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NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 



AND 



FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 



y 



BY 



R. E. FRANCILLON, 



AUTHOR OF " PEARL AND EMERALD.' 




LONDON : 
SMITH, ELDER AND CO, 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 

1872. 



[all rights reserved.] 



7R Vl*f 



REPRINTED FROM THE "GLOBE NEWSPAPER." 



i 


c 



PREFACE. 



THE following short sketches bear sufficient signs 
of their ephemeral production. This I put for- 
ward as an explanation rather than as an apology. 
The " National Characteristics " are meant, not to 
be exhaustive, but to bring out some salient 
points in ourselves and in our neighbours to which 
habit and conventional judgments are apt to blind 
us. It is not my fault if they sometimes appear 
paradoxical. The " Flora and Fauna of London " 
is a slight attempt to grasp some portion of the 
poetry that clings far more to city bye-ways than 
to country lanes. London is the greatest of all 
poems : and it is well to suggest how the pilgrim 
of the flag-stones may find food for fancy without 
spending so much as a penny at a book-stall. 



CONTENTS, 



NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

PAGE 

Preface iii 

I. Alphonse , I 

II. Hans 9 

III. Giuseppe 1 7 

IV. Juan 25 

V. Ali 31 

VI. Jonathan , 38 

VII. Patrick 45 

VIII. Alexander 52 

IX. David 59 

X. John 66 



CONTENTS. 



FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 



PAGE 



I. Among the "Gods" 77 

II. Among the Stars 82 

III. Among the Grasshoppers 87 

IV. Among the Stalks 92 

V. Among the Blight 97 

VI. Among the Caterpillars 102 

VII. Among the Molluscs 107 

VIII. Among the Sunflowers 112 

IX. Among the Rooks 117 

X. Among the Cages 122 

XI. Among the Water-lilies 127 

XII. Among the Sparrows 133 



NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 



NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 



L 
ALPHONSE. 



" Could some power the giftie gie us, to see 
ourselves as others see us," we should see — 
something altogether unlike our real selves. A 
Meess Anglaise y with her flat ringlets, her long 
waxen face, and projecting teeth, is — in spite of 
Gavarni, of the Charivari, nay, of M. Taine 
himself — not more unlike the English girl than 
is the Frenchman whom tourists see through their 
travelling spectacles unlike the Frenchman whose 
real image is reflected upon the naked retina, 
but not conveyed to the brain. We are, perhaps, 
more generous in our judgment of our neighbours 

T 



2 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

than they are of us ; but, unfortunately, even 
envy does not mislead so much as generosity. 
The classic saying, " They do these things better 
in France," which Sterne, the original ancestor 
of English humour, meant to be taken — not 
exactly literally, is a leading case in the common 
art of misunderstanding irony. 

Hogarth has much to answer for, besides the 
mistake of thinking that the idle apprentice always 
comes to the gallows, and that the industrious 
always becomes Lord Mayor. The anatomical 
caricature whom he, and no officer of the guard, 
put on duty at Calais gate, is not the least like 
any French soldier that ever was or that ever 
will be. The scarecrow refugees whom he depicted 
tripping out of church in their land of refuge 
were not, one may be sure, the sons and daughters 
of the Huguenot gentlemen who fought so fiercely 
and so stoutly for their faith in the Cevennes. 
But Hogarth was an Englishman : and so to 
this day, even those who have with their own 
eyes beheld the real French soldier, strong, active, 
well-fed, and broad-shouldered, though not rivalling 
the lofty moving tower we call a Guardsman, will 



ALPHONSE. 3 

still talk with contempt of his physique as though 
Waterloo had been an easy victory to win, or the 
Malakof a playground. Englishmen seem to need 
English air for the proper use of their eyes. 
There are very good people who have lived for 
years at Tours or Boulogne, and who have not 
been able, in spite of all their experience, to free 
themselves from the strange delusion that our 
nearest neighbours are distinguished for wit and 
polish above all nations of the civilized world. A 
lady has been known to travel from Calais to 
Marseilles, a butt for stares such as only your 
true-bred Frenchmen can stare, and a victim of 
frantic crushes at tables d'hote and elsewhere such 
as only a herd of hungry Frenchmen can form, 
and yet hold to the nursery legend that these 
monsieurs are the very pink of politeness, and her 
own countrymen a race of Polar bears. It is 
very strange. After much consideration, a long 
course of reading, and careful comparison, I have 
come to the conclusion that the conventional 
Frenchman is something as follows : — His name is 
Alphonse, unless it happens to be Jules. He is 
slight, meagre, but graceful in make, olive com- 



4 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

plexioned, with white teeth, and a good crop of 
glossy hair, worn a la porcupine. He is quick in 
speech, and gesticulatory in manner ; frivolous, 
perhaps, but lively, witty, gay, and ready at 
repartee ; careless of time and money, and not 
over moral in his domestic relations ; but courteous 
to all men, and gallantly, even chivalrously, polite 
to les dames. His daily life he has made so 
agreeable, down to every detail, that he may be 
excused for not being able to translate the w r ord 
Home. His taste in every art, up to that of 
cookery, is delicate and refined, while his quick 
sense of honour makes him as considerate of 
others as he wishes others to be of him. Laugh 
at him, caricature him as we may, these traits 
still lie at the bottom of our loudest laughter, and 
our grossest caricatures. Le voila, the Frenchman. 
Le voila le Chameau ! It is all as false as perjury 
itself, every word. Behold the true Alphonse, as 
he is — which is not quite the same as what he 
ought to be. 

Alphonse — why do we always think of him as 
Alphonse ? — is so far from being slight or meagre 
that he achieves the dignity of embonpoint when 



ALPHONSE. 5 

broadshouldered young Englishmen can still wear 
a lady's girdle. I am talking of the typical 
Alphonse, be it understood, not of the few million 
exceptions that are, of course, to be found here 
and there. So far is he from being specially 
favoured in point of chevelure — though I admit 
the porcupine — that a gathering of Frenchmen of 
any class, to a spectator enjoying a bird's-eye 
view, in no way differs from one of British savants, 
who have a traditional right to the smoothly- 
polished crown. There is no reason to think that 
Parisian dentists complain of slackness of trade, 
while the olive complexion — which ought, by the 
way, according to literal interpretation, to be a 
shade of dull green — is about as common north 
of Provence or Gascony as in Middlesex. In 
figure, he is less inclined to be graceful than 
clumsy. Under these circumstances, vivacity can 
scarcely be expected ; and Alphonse — not the con- 
ventional Alphonse — is not vivacious. His soul is 
too much engrossed with the funds, with the shop, 
with the grim politics of the transitory minute, 
to have much room for esprit — the delicate bouquet 
which vanished for ever in the foul reek of the 



6 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

guillotine eighty years ago. A witty Englishman 
is a rare bird, but a witty Frenchman, whatever 
may have been the case in by-gone days, is a 
veritable black swan. As to humour — tell a good 
story, such as ears may hear without reddening, 
to our typical Alphonse, and you will see. It is 
France, not England, which is the true nation 
bourgeoise, the nation of shopkeepers. Alphonse, 
our typical Alphonse, is eight times out of ten a 
shopkeeper in some form ; nine times out of ten 
he has the soul of one. He is economical to 
niggardliness, and takes care not only of the francs, 
but of the centimes, and pockets his lumps of 
sugar. The flaneur, the petit creve, is not the 
typical Alphonse — he works laboriously for his 
dull pleasures, and measures his satisfaction in 
them by the sous he saves. And, alas ! it is not 
Alphonse who makes room for you at table, or 
who apologises for having trodden on your train — 
it is your compatriot, whom you have nevertheless 
labelled " Bear." And gaiety — is it found among 
the children who do not know how to play, the 
young men who know how to play only too well, 
the young girls who are buried out of sight until 



ALPHONSE. 7 

the day of sale, or the keen-eyed business women, 
who make such admirable commercial partners in 
maturer years ? 

It would take a volume to trace Alphonse in 
all his Protean forms — to analyse him, and to point 
out where, how and why the rule ceases and the 
exception begins. He, too, has his varieties — his 
types and sub-types, his orders, genera, and 
species. Only, when you meet him, see which 
portrait he most resembles — that which I have 
drawn, or that of his great grandfather, who died 
long ago, but which we still obstinately regard as 
of more than photographic fidelity. Why will we 
insist upon keeping up a fiction of the ancien 
regime, with all graceful vices and buried graces ? 
Perhaps in time we may get rid of the delusion 
that, while our labourers and artisans drink ale 
and gin, Alphonse, ouvrier, is content with eau 
sucree, or with harmless and wholesome wine. 
Perhaps we shall one day learn that national 
resemblances, at any given period, are more 
numerous than national differences, and that indi- 
vidual peculiarities are no index to the character- 
istics of a people. 



8 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

It is hard to say of a nation that it has lost 
its race of gentlemen. But of France it must be 
said that her great and still progressing revolution 
has sacrificed her caste of gentlemen — such a caste 
as once, with all its vices, made French society- 
synonymous with grace, brilliancy, and courtesy. 
Assertive self-consciousness has taken the place 
of well-bred ease, and the conventional traditions 
are built upon a foundation of shifting sand which 
may be, or may not be, transforming itself gradu- 
ally into a rock of rough and self-reliant virtues. 
It may be hard to give up our picturesque 
Alphonse of tradition, and to take another in his 
room. But the true Alphonse is a fact, and a 
very solid fact besides ; and it is not a little ridi- 
culous on our part to insist upon setting up the 
ghost of his grandfather in his place, and calling 
it the Frenchman of the present day. 



( 9 ) 



II. 

HANS. 

If there was one person in the world whom we 
thought we knew, that man was Hans. How, in 
fact, should we fail to comprehend our own first 
cousin ? Not that we were very proud of the 
relationship. We had laughed at him and sneered 
at him ever since the Reverend Peter Pindar, who 
did not reverence many things, took to flying at 
such small game as Madame Schwellenberg. Of 
course we knew him. It was nothing to us that 
there were such distinctions as Swabia, Austria, 
Saxony, Brandenburg, Hans was Hans, whether 
in lively Vienna or un-lively Berlin. There have 
been benighted foreigners ignorant enough to 
imagine that an English milord habitually appears 
in the park with the kilt and philabeg of old 



io NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

Gaul. Is it wonderful, therefore, that we who of 
course are neither benighted nor foreigners, should, 
model all the tetes carries, as the French call the 
Germans, upon one type, and that our typical 
Hans should be as conventional as the stage 
Irishman ? 

Let us endeavour to clothe with flesh that 
ghostly Hans. The task ought not to be hard, 
for it would be hard to find his bones. He is 
something of the build of the conventional Low 
Dutchman — who, by the way, thanks to Alva's 
soldiers, is often as much Spanish in feature and 
complexion as a peasant of Connemara. Hans 
is of low stature, pale and flabby complexion, 
colourless eyes, protected by spectacles, and scanty 
flaxen hair. He smokes Knaster by the hundred- 
weight, and washes it down with butts of Bairisch 
beer. Parallel with these occupations he dreams 
over transcendental philosophy, which, to our 
common sense, seems like dreaming over the 
smoke that curls slowly from his china bowl. 
He was a hot duellist in his short span of youth, 
and wears the seam of a sabre cut that he will 
carry to the grave. He is a pattern husband, and 



HANS. II 

his great holiday is to give to little Hans and 
Gretchen the treat of a Christmas tree. Of 
course we do not forget that Germany is the land 
of learning and of intellectual culture. But we 
distrust the learning that ends in a Strauss, and 
the music that develops into a Wagner. We are 
speaking of the type that rises before our eyes 
when we hear the name of Hans, the product of 
brat-wurst and sauer-krant, of Kant and Jean 
Paul. There was once a celebrated professor who 
had never put on his boots for twenty years. 
We feel certain that professor's name was Hans. 
Some of us despised him, but without hatred ; 
others liked him, and his quiet, kindly, homely 
ways, but made him a sort of national butt all 
the same. 

Suddenly — could it be that we were wrong ? — 
there marched across the Rhine a man, wearing 
spectacles it is true, and of cold, not to say 
repellent manners. But he was as tall, as broad- 
shouldered, as firm on his legs and as strong in 
his arms as a picked English grenadier. His 
characteristic was a crushing force of will " With- 
out haste, but without rest," as Gothe says, he had 



12 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

made up his mind that something had to be done, 
and he did it, with no pause for dreaming by the 
way. He was an intelligent machine, rather than 
a man ; superior to wear and tear, to hunger and 
fatigue. He had learned not only strength, but 
its economy. Nothing unnecessary he did : but 
he stayed at nothing. On principle he could be 
deliberately cruel, and did not even soften the 
weight of a heavy blow by one apparent touch of 
human sympathy. We knew, for a fact, that this 
was the real typical Hans — the noble, the peasant, 
the artist, the shopman, the student, the professor 
— all were there, and yet, to look for our old Hans 
was to look in vain. He was prompt, practical, 
hard, energetic, sudden, thorough. Could it be 
the same ? Or was this a startling instance 
indeed of the mutual ignorance between, nations 
of the same blood, and almost of the same tongue ? 
It was, and it was not the same. The Hans 
whom we had known had never been — he had 
been the exception, not the type even of so much 
as a university town. We must remember that 
nations are, after all, but aggregates of men. On 
that principle, if Hans has been a dreamer, his 



HANS. 13 

dreams have been very like other men's waking. 
Germany, that we have deemed so slow, is the 
swiftest country in the world, therefore is Hans 
the swiftest of men. Go to the Latin races to 
look for dreams and dreamers. German literature, 
for instance, equals, if it does not more than equal, 
our own. Yet ours has been the slow growth of 
more than three centuries — the German, the rapid 
growth of but little more than one. German 
political life has almost reached maturity in half 
the time. Heine, who was not a German, and 
who had the contempt of a foreigner for Hans, 
taunted him with his slowness in not doing and 
becoming all things in a day. Little cared Hans 
for the sharp lashes of the witty Jew. He was 
growing in the stem — not shooting out random 
branches that are cut off before fruit can come. 
The typical Hans has, in short, a perfect mania 
for the practical. All he does, all he thinks, all 
he reads, all he dreams — if he must be said to 
dream — are tasks to which he sets himself with a 
deliberate end in view. It may be that his object 
is to save a competence, it may be that it is to 
trace the derivation of a word, or to enjoy himself, 



14 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

or to swindle, or to invent a system of theology. 
But in any case he is not content till he has gone 
as far as the day's length will permit, and the 
day's task is done. He has none of the cynic's 
humour. All things are worth doing, and all 
things must be done thoroughly, or not at all. 
No wonder the typical Hans has few words to 
spare. No wonder that he is self-absorbed — not 
to say selfish — in his paths and in his aims. Add 
to this that he has, as a rule, the physical endu- 
rance of an elephant, and you have described 
Genius — something beyond our mere common 
sense, however we may boast, to understand. No 
wonder that Hans runs into cloudy sentiment as 
a relief from hard realities, and seeks rest from 
labour in fanciful speculation. It was even so that 
the First Napoleon chose for his mental recreation 
the poems of Ossian — at first sight the most 
uncongenial to such a mind. No wonder, too, 
that, when brought into contact with lighter- 
hearted and brighter races, the hand of Hans 
feels like a cold grasp of steel. It crumpled up 
the petals of Italy as Gotz of the iron hand 
would have plucked a flower. As for his home- 



HANS. 15 

liness what home is that where the wife is but 
cook and stocking-mender, without an idea in 
common with her lord and master save that of 
work, which, in her case, degrades her out of 
the bright intelligence and gracious ways that 
ought to be the birthright of every woman in the 
world ? The home of Hans is in himself: he does 
but eat and sleep in the warmth of the stove. 
There is no man so falsely represented, even in 
his own literature, as Hans. His literature is so 
purely poetic just because he himself is such pure 
prose. He cannot write in prose ; but he can live 
it, and he lives it sternly, with no thought of com- 
fort as an end, or of turning aside to gather the 
few flowers that grow by the way. If they come 
of themselves, it may be well ; if not, perhaps all 
the better. 

On the whole, I consider that Hans is a man 
who first of all loves an idea of some sort, then 
himself, and then all things and persons that are 
serviceable to either of the two. That he is cold, 
not by nature, but because he is self-absorbed. 
That he is inclined to sentiment and to poetry 
because he is practical to the very core. That he, 



16 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

as long as he can live his own life, is careless of 
what others think of him. That he is great in art 
because art also is a form of work, and therefore 
worth the doing just as much as digging in the 
fields. Lastly, that all his other qualities, good, 
bad, and indifferent, are developed from these. 
Of course I am keeping to the typical Hans : nor 
do I refuse to regard the millions of his brethren 
who are different from him in the details that 
everywhere distinguish man from man. But at 
the apparent, not real, transformation of Hans 
we can wonder no more. Men and nations alike 
are capable of all things when actuated by an all- 
mastering and living idea, and when they have 
the will and the power to do with all their might 
all that their right hand finds to do, for the sake 
of doing it, and not for the sake of daily comfort 
or empty fame. 



( i7 ) 



III. 

GIUSEPPE. 

The average Englishman of Goldsmith's days 
may be excused for judging the Italian from the 
specimens who bore upon their inflated shoulders 
the whole weight of the lyric stage. No doubt 
Lord Allcash, in Fra Diavolo, is a very exact 
portrait of an Englishman. It is a well-known 
habit of Englishmen to travel in curl papers and 
green veils, with all their wives' diamonds packed 
up in a hand valise for security, and to make 
" Oh, yes," and " Shocking," do duty for con- 
versation. It is also well known that an Italian is 
a gifted, but wayward being, who lives a life of 
melody and maccaroni ; who is either a Papal 
fanatic or political conspirator, according to cir- 
cumstances, and who translates summum bonum by 

2 



1 8 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 

dolce far niente. It is supposed to be rather a 
privilege to be acquainted with a " signor n — why, 
it is hard to say, unless a " signor " is a remarkable 
and interesting creature by right of not being 
either Mr. or Monsieur. At the same time it is 
the fashion to conceive that no Englishman can 
understand an Italian : that while we represent 
hard, prosaic common sense he represents the last 
feeble flash of whatever poetry still lingers as a 
reality among men. And yet we cannot forget 
either historic Italy, or be blind to the active life 
that seethes in her to-day. No wonder that the 
habitue of the Opera is confused. In effect, we 
have made up our minds to decline Italia accord- 
ing to the rules of the feminine declension. She 
has been called the " Niobe of Nations ; " and a 
weeping statue she shall remain, in spite of every- 
thing. Giuseppe — we are not so far out in our 
typical name — shall be a maccaroni-munching 
lazzarone, a dreamer, subject to the malady of 
eternal childhood. No wonder that we do not 
comprehend him and his ways, for we will not see 
the glaring fact that there is no one so like an 
Englishman as the typical Italian — be he from 



GIUSEPPE. 19 

Rome, Naples, Florence, or Turin. No one is 
so like the typical Italian as the typical English- 
man. 

We ought to be ashamed of being imposed 
upon by tricks of manner, which are no more part 
of the essence of the Italian than our tricks of 
manner are of ourselves. The Neapolitan's warmth 
of nature is no more to be measured by his 
warmth of manner than rigidity of tongue or limb 
is to be taken as the index to the true nature of 
the Englishman or Piedmontese. Had we all of 
us Giuseppe's flashing dark eyes and mobile mouth 
— mere accidents that they are — we also should 
show all our passing impulses in the same demon- 
strative way. It is mere slander to call the Italian 
insincere. Only he unconsciously shows his tran- 
sient feelings, w T hile our grey eyes are incapable of 
showing those that take their root in our souls. It 
is absurd to say that we Englishmen have not our 
full share of insincerity — it is nothing more than 
that climate has given us the advantage of being 
unable to express as much as we wish to be 
thought to mean. There never was a dark-eyed 
man yet, of whatever nation he might be, who was 



20 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

not open to the charge of insincerity ; never a 
grey-eyed man who was not held to be cold and 
reserved : while, in reality, the true difference 
between them might lie all the other way. And, 
as with men, so with nations, which are made up 
of men. 

It is true that the Italian forgets his protesta- 
tions of eternal devotion when your back is turned, 
and he finds himself in a position to make the 
same protestations to your deadliest enemy. What 
would you ? It is nothing more than oiling the 
hard wheels of human life to be on comfortable 
terms with all. It is true that with the traditional 
esprit fort of his country — has not Italy been the 
cradle of free thought since the days of Dante ? — 
he retains the superstitions of the nursery. Is it 
not well to stand well with all the powers that are ? 
He keeps a conscience, and finds it sometimes 
clash with nineteenth-century doctrines of liberty, 
to which his living eyes cannot be blind, so he 
temporises, and if he can no longer believe in the 
Pope he follows Garibaldi, and sends for the 
priest when the physician of the body warns 
him that he must die. But in all these things 



GIUSEPPE. 21 

does he differ so widely, in principle, from 
ourselves. 

There is but little of the suppleness with which 
he is credited in the nature of the Italian. It is on 
principle that he seeks to be all things to all men. 
Know him well and you will find that he has a 
strong individual character of his own. He is not 
like the natives of la Grande Nation, of whom, if 
you know one, you know all. He is in the first 
place an Italian, then a Milanese, Venetian, or 
Neapolitan, then the offspring of a parish, different 
from all other parishes ; and, lastly, the Giuseppe 
who differs from all other Giuseppes as much as 
the letter A differs from the letter B. His sole 
national characteristic is that, unless he comes 
from the north, he has dark hair and bright eyes. 
In all other respects, you must know Italy as you 
know England before you can pretend to say that 
you know in what way he differs from you. You 
may know an Italian, but the typical Italian you 
cannot know. The typical Italian exists nowhere 
beyond the pages of Childe Harold or the walls of 
Covent Garden. He is not Fra Diavolo, and yet 
he may be Fra Diavolo, and a great deal more. 



22 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

He is not, typically, the Garibaldino, nor the 
Cordino, nor the tenore, nor the lazzarone, nor — 
but what end is there to the catalogue of what he 
may or may not be ? The Italian may be any- 
thing. He may be the professional cavalier 
serviente, who spends his days in saving another 
man's wife the trouble of flirting her own fan ; or 
he may be the reckless soldier, or the devoted 
priest, or the chevalier d? Industrie, or the operatic 
tenor, the brilliant poet, the flashy poetaster, the 
astronomer, the political economist, the engineer 
of Mont Cenis, the Mazzini, the Cavour. The 
typical Italian is as versatile as the typical 
Englishman. How therefore can we understand 
him any more than we can understand ourselves ? 
Giuseppe is as tall, as broad-shouldered, as strongly 
made as an Englishman — "barring the beef." He 
is cool and steady in fight, without the boasted 
elan of the grande armee, but without the tendency 
to panic which is the natural result of elan. He is 
our rival in respect of the grosser forms of gour- 
mandise, and if he stays his appetite with rice and 
maccaroni — why, if we had not good mutton, we 
should become maccaroni eaters too. It is a mis- 



GIUSEPPE. 23 

take, moreover, to accuse Giuseppe of being an 
imaginative creature. There are but two countries 
in the world wherein common sense reigns supreme 
over logic, reason, experience, all sense, in short, 
which is uncommon — and these are England and 
Italy. An Italian — the typical Italian, I mean — 
thinks more of taxes than of ideas, and, in spite of 
conventional tradition, amuses himself very much 
on system, as though, as w T ith us, amusement were 
a natural part of the day's toil that has to be got 
through. He is theoretically fond of change, but 
slow to improve, and his first question always is, 
Will it pay or save ? Giuseppe is a born economist, 
at least in the matter of half-pence : and if he only 
possessed a little more national energy— but the 
parallel is interminable. I cannot help feeling 
that an Englishman should be shy, not to say 
humble, in judging Italy. It may be patriotic to 
modestly confess our inability to understand, but 
it is, at the same time, to deny a bond of sym- 
pathy which ought to be the pride of the two 
greatest nations of the modern world. Every 
sarcasm launched at Italy is reflected from the 
cliffs of Albion. Florence is a home to English- 



24 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

men — London to Giuseppe, such as to neither can 
be Paris or Berlin. Nor have we, with all our 
wealth of iron and coal, carried out one idea — 
steam apart — which had not its birth in the land 
which was once the appanage of Rome. 



( 2 5 ) 



IV. 

JUAN. 

Cervantes, Le Sage, and Beaumarchais are our 
authorities for the manners and customs of Juan. It 
is observable that very few people, comparatively, 
are acquainted with a live Spaniard, so that the 
fellow-countrymen of Cid Rodrigo y Diaz share 
with their national hero a quasi-poetic cha- 
racter. Once upon a time not to know Juan 
was much the same as not to know anything 
beyond the limits of a country town. Spain was 
to the far North, South, East, and West what 
England is now ; and even more, for it was rather 
easier to hold the world in one's hand than it has 
become since the days when the map of America 
was more barren than that of Central Africa. 
But we do not take for our typical Juan the ship- 
mates of Columbus and Pizarro, the soldiers of 



26 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

Alva, or those who fought either in the Bay of 
Lepanto or — with not quite such good success — 
in our narrow seas. Of course it is necessary 
to prefix to his name the title of " Don," and to 
translate his name into the Italian Giovanni. 
The ladies of Cadiz, whom Childe Harold found 
so fascinating, would, it is needless to say, scarcely 
fail to bring flirtation into fashion if there was 
ever a time or country in which it was a thing 
unknown. Now it is absolutely necessary that 
the lover, whether of romance or comedy — and 
it is there alone that we find our typical Juan — 
should be furnished with a guitar, or at least 
with a mandoline. So a guitar we accordingly 
give him, and even idealise that very sorry instru- 
ment until its feeble tinkle becomes poetical, 
if not very musical. With that instrument we 
send him forth to conquer, not the Indies, but 
Donna Inez, who, as all the world knows, 
likes nothing so well as to be woke up at the 
cold hours of morning to listen to a serenade. 
In personal appearance Juan is decidedly in- 
teresting. He is glued to a cigarette, and lives 
upon garlic and pumpkins. He earns his living 



JUAN. 27 

by shouting " Bravo toro ! " at bullfights : so that, 
according to the laws of trade as they exist in 
more prosaic lands, his tailor must be content 
to wait a considerable time before he is paid for 
that gorgeous costume a la Matador. The in- 
trigues in which he is hourly engaged would 
drive an ambassador to despair ; out of gestures 
and fan-flutterings he has constructed a code of 
diplomacy far superior to that of the Atlantic 
Cable itself. At the same time he is grave, dig- 
nified, and as ready at the knife as the conven- 
tional alderman. In fact, if all accounts be true, 
the land of Juan is a rechauffe of a great many 
things, which, except the garlic, are very charming 
and very impossible. 

A visit to Seville is, it must be owned, a 
little disappointing : a visit to Madrid still more. 
Even as the Englishman who has carefully 
trained himself out of books in the accent of 
the most " choice Castilian " finds it anything 
but the pronunciation recognised in Castile, so 
does the reader of tradition find himself, though 
his voyage is over, still at sea. " Cosas d'Espana " 
— things of Spain — are peculiar; but they are 



28 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

not much more peculiar than other things else- 
where. Juan is there in the flesh, but the spi- 
ritual charm is gone. One very soon finds out 
that what is most beautiful at a distance may- 
become not only very unpicturesque, but very 
disagreeable. A beggar boy by Murillo is a 
magnificent study : so is a monk by Velasquez ; 
and at a fancy ball, on an English brunette, there 
is nothing so charming as a Spanish costume. 
But Murillo and Velasquez were painters great 
enough to have found equally good subjects to 
idealise Whitechapel, and Donna Inez thinks 
nothing so becoming as a bonnet fresh from the 
boulevards. As to Juan himself, it is true that 
he is fond of tobacco and content with the worst 
cookery in the world — when he can get nothing 
better, but I have never found that his forte is 
sentiment, or that he is able to get his living 
out of bull-fights and serenades. He may be 
always in love, but he for the most part shows 
it by lounging over a newspaper at the cafe. From 
the poetic atmosphere which hides his country 
from the outer world he inhales not a single 
breath. To him the history of his country dates 



JUAN. 29 

from the to-morrow which never comes ; and, on 
that ground, he considers himself nothing if not 
a politician. He belongs to whichever of the 
thirteen parties his need of dollars leads him to 
choose, and spends the dollar, when he gets it, 
not in feeing Donna Clara's waiting maid, but in 
making experiments as to how far a dollar w r ill go. 
He is — it must be said — a rather cold-blooded 
animal. His eyes still flash, but the good rich 
Arab blood has long begun to turn thin — or, as he 
would prefer to call it, blue. There is something 
terribly unsatisfactory about Juan. Everything 
about him seems to turn mean and sour. By 
politics he seems to understand the art of better- 
ing himself at the expense of his neighbours, and 
it is doubtful if he is really moved to enthu- 
siasm even by the fullest rhetoric in which poli- 
ticians of his stamp are the most prone to indulge. 
He lives temperately and poorly, not because he 
is a philosopher, but because all his desires could 
be wrapped up in a packet no larger than a 
cigarette paper — and that there is no symptom 
of largeness of soul. Being human, he wants 
something : but he does not know what he wants, 



30 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 

so he welcomes anything like a change — even a 
game at revolution — in order to escape from the 
national ennui. I am aware that I am flying in 
the face of all tradition when I call Juan the 
type of the lymphatic temperament pushed to 
its utmost verge. It is not his soul that speaks 
in his warm skin, his dignified aspect, and his 
flashing eyes. These come down to him from 
other days when his fathers the Goths were strug- 
gling for supremacy with his mothers the Moors. 
Juan is the degenerate descendant of a northern 
race left to decay in an uncongenial land. But 
tradition, bestowed by genius, clings : and no 
doubt every one who has visited Juan at home 
has looked for what he expected to see, and 
found it accordingly. It is very easy to create 
poetry everywhere, far more easy than to read 
plain prose — and Juan, if not Inez, is very plain 
indeed. Let us by all means enjoy the dream 
that the fairy land of Don Quixote is the Spain 
of to-day, and therein build a castle before which 
Juan may pose gracefully with his guitar. The 
real Castle of Indolence, wherein Juan really 
dwells, has been built by far less artistic hands. 



( 3i ) 



V. 

ALL 

The genii whom children raise are not those such 
as the child James Watt raised, like the fisherman 
of the Arabian Nights, from the spout of an 
innocent tea-kettle. They are those which 
swarmed round the Sultan's couch at the magic 
words of Scheherazade. They swarm round the 
couch of Ali still, whether he dreams amid the 
roses of Damascus, the bales of Bassorah, the 
minarets of Constantinople, or the fountains and 
love-songs of Ispahan. Five concentric circles 
enclose the chamber of Ali, and hide him from our 
waking eyes. First come the houris and peris, 
with finger-tips rosy as those of Aurora, with faces 
like the full moon. The second is a circle of 
comedy, of calendars, of hunchbacks, of barbers 



32 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

through whom walks the great Caliph Haroun, 
attended by Giaffar and Mesrour. The third is 
composed of all who have sung and written in the 
East when the East was young : the fourth, of all 
who have sung and written of the East since the 
East has grown old. The fifth is the circle of the 
Djinn, who have made the Orient an oasis in a 
desert of steam, and who make a man's first 
sight of the Golden Horn an era in the history 
of his days. And it is through these misty 
mysteries that we look upon Ali ; he is the magic 
centre, the type of what the child, holding 
Haroun's hand, and voyaging with Sinbad, will 
not allow the man to disbelieve in his maturer 
years. 

Withdraw, then, shapes of steam made black 
and foul with the price and prose of coal, and let 
Ali emerge from his chamber into the outer day. 
What guise will he take but one, whether he be 
Turk, Arab, or Persian, emir, barber, or slave ? 
His head will be swathed in the folds of the sacred 
turban, his figure will be draped in robes, his 
beard will hide his breast, and the jewelled hilt of 
his curved scimitar will be ready to his hand. 



ALL 33 

Bismillah ! Sit down by him on the divan, 
whence he never rises, but reclines all day long in 
dignified repose : let him clap his hands that the 
attendant negro may bring coffee and the chi- 
bouque : and let us find in the flesh the type of 
that wondrous East which, as it has been, so is, 
and ever will be. Thrust aside that stiff* figure, in 
frock coat and fez, who stands in the way as you 
advance with shoeless feet over the floor, and who 
looks as though he had taken an ale-cork for the 
glass of his fashion and the mould of his form. 
He is smoking a cigar : you came to inhale the 
dreamy fumes of the narghile. He addresses you 
in French — he must be the dragoman. You ask 
for Ali. Alas ! the magic rings, iris-hued as soap 
bubbles, have vanished into air. The ale-cork 
is Ali. 

He has not forgotten his old-fashioned Eastern 
courtesy — the best, if not the most sincere, form 
of courtesy in the world. He will not just yet 
introduce you to the ladies of his family, but he 
will ask you to dinner, and go with you to the 
opera afterwards, where you will hear the " Tro- 
vatore " performed by singers who have not 

3 



34 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

succeeded too well in Naples or Milan. He will 
talk to you of progress and the Eastern question 
as intelligently, and almost as intelligibly, as an 
habitue of Pall Mall. And yet there is an inde- 
finable something about him, as about his here- 
ditary enemy the Russian, that makes you feel 
that if he is not the Ali of whom you dreamed, he 
has only put off the turban without donning 
such a hat as your own. The fez is a com- 
promise. His limbs are stiff and awkward in 
the very shooting jacket in which we feel most at 
ease. There is a buttoned-up appearance about 
him, and a straightness, as though he were 
momentarily afraid of giving way. I am speaking, 
of course, more particularly of the Turkish or 
dominant Ali, for though the tendency is true of 
all, there is no railway yet to Teheran. The fact 
is, the Turk feels himself standing on a thin plank, 
on which he must pose, as it were, on one leg, in 
order to retain his balance, and practise the goose- 
step in order to keep up a semblance of getting 
on. Ali is trying to grow young, and thinks that 
by a severe process of tight lacing with red tape 
he will reduce himself into Occidental formality. 



ALL 35 

Only it will not do. A man does not imbibe the 
Western spirit by suddenly finding out that 
champagne is not forbidden by the Koran. The 
Indians of the West were not put in sympathy 
with their persecutors by force of fire-water, nor 
did that pioneer of civilization enable them to hold 
what was once their own. There is no force but in 
race and in being true to its traditions, not only in 
spirit, but in form. It was the old AH, almost 
such as he was when Mahomet launched him from 
the desert, that needed a Sobieski to drive him 
from Vienna, and a Charlemagne to keep him 
beyond the Pyrenees. The new AH is something 
of an esprit fort. He can read, and he reads the 
newspapers. He does not despise the Giaour — he 
hates and tries to ape him. He has become useful 
as a kind of feather-bed between the Levant and 
the Black Sea. Even his wife no longer wonders 
at the strange and distorted figures of her Western 
sisters : she, too, has heard of a pannier and a 
chignon, if all tales of the harem be true. If she 
retains her veil, some sceptics are inclined to think 
it is on the same ground as that on which certain 
ladies were once supposed to go masked to the 



36 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

playhouse, to conceal something else than beauty. 
She will soon learn the compensatory qualities of 
a bonnet of the newest fashion, and then the veil 
itself will go. Jealousy is not a modern failing, 
and it is not so easy to drop a sack silently in 
the Bosphorus as it used to be. Gas has thrown a 
cruel glare over the mysteries of the Golden Horn. 
But, as I have said, race is race. To cease to be 
one thing is not to become another. If London 
were to ape Constantinople the effect would not be 
more grotesque than for Constantinople to mimic 
London. The East and the West cannot sympa- 
thize, and for the East to strive with success after 
Western development is as hopeless as for the 
West to endeavour to stand still. It is only to 
substitute frivolity for earnestness, the fez for the 
turban. It depends upon the feelings of each of 
us to decide whether we would for the sake of 
romance retain the East in all its hideous glory, or 
whether, for the sake of the triumph of steam, we 
would let it sink into the realms of historic 
mythology. For my part, when I wish to journey 
Eastward, I take M. Galland for my dragoman, 
and shall not be altogether content when a railway 



ALL 37 

junction is opened at Sinai. A pilgrimage should 
be something real, not a thing to be managed by a 
tour-monger as if it were a cheap trip to Heme 
Bay. However, like all things else, Ali must be 
taken as he is found. Only it is not merely a 
matter for sentimental regret that what he is 
should be no longer what he has been. He was 
the natural guardian of all that is most sacred in 
the history of the world. He has become an 
undeveloped stoker. The steam genii are closing 
round him, and before long, we may expect to see 
the lands he should for the world's sake guard 
from Western desecration turned into another 
paradise of railways and hotels — as real as our 
own, and perhaps managed almost as badly. 
When that time comes, I do not know that the 
downfall of the Crescent will have been an un- 
diluted advantage. It at least admitted the fact 
that there are a few matters in which the world is 
at its best when standing still. 



38 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 



VI. 

JONATHAN. 

The typical American is called Jonathan because 
it scarcely ever happens that Jonathan is his real 
name. On the same principle, called by ancient 
grammarians and modern pedants lucus a non 
lucendoy he is also popularly termed a Yankee, 
because a certain proportion of his fellow-citizens 
happen to be born in the half-dozen little States 
of New England — the only territory whose inhabi- 
tants have a recognised right to that illustrious 
title. Let him hail from Tennessee, Louisiana, 
even from California, he is still a Yankee. Even 
so a native of old England, whether from Cornwall 
or Northumberland, is of course a Londoner, all 
the same. With a becoming scorn of transatlantic 
things, we ignore distinctions whether of race or 



JON A THAN, 39 

of geography, and take the great Elijah Pogram — 
an institution of course totally unknown among 
ourselves — as the typical specimen of those whom 
Englishmen, when in an affectionate mood, call 
brothers, on the ground, presumably, that they are 
mainly of Irish or German extraction. In short, 
the typical Jonathan, dressed like a scarecrow in 
the rags of a humour that is ever fresh though 
ever stale, is about as true to nature as John Bull. 

There is no need to repeat the work of carica- 
turists by describing the typical " Yankee," who 
stands alike for the Xew York Knickerbocker, for 
the peaceful graduate of Harvard, for the bowie- 
bearing backwoodsman, for the representative of a 
" First Family of Virginia " — for all the types and 
classes that go to make up a nation as varied as 
the whole of Europe put together. We know him 
by heart, and his conventional eccentricities form a 
literature and a picture gallery by themselves. 
The strange part of the matter is that while most 
of us have been acquainted with compatriots of 
that bird whose home is in the setting sun, few of 
us have found in him the offensive conventionality 
made up of one part maniac, one part charlatan, 



40 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

one part boor, and one part rogue. Beyond 
certain peculiarities of speech, dress, and accent, 
which are peculiarities because they are not our 
own, and certain political notions which are wrong, 
because England — as some think, happily — is not 
yet an outlying territory of the Great Republic, we 
have been in each case content to admit that our 
acquaintance afforded a piquant and pleasant 
exception to the manners and customs of the 
Jonathan in whom, nevertheless, we are deter- 
mined to believe. Be it so. The travelled 
American whom most of us have met may not 
be a fair representative of the American at home. 
What are the characteristics which, without re- 
garding subordinate types, distinguish the true 
American, be he Yankee or not Yankee, from the 
rest of the world ? 

The answer lies in one word. Barnum was an 
American, and the Americans believed in Barnum. 
Joseph Smith, who invented Mormonism, was a 
citizen of America, and the Americans — at least 
a great many of them — believed in Joseph Smith. 
Spiritualism and all other words of a similar termi- 
nation, free-love, and all other institutions with a 



JONATHAN. 41 

similar prefix, talk valued in proportion to tallness, 
promises believed in proportion to impossibility 
of performance, hero worship of men who are not 
heroes, theories without facts and imaginary facts 
not to be explained by theories, are essentially 
of transatlantic growth and transatlantic cultiva- 
tion. The Land of Jonathan plumes itself upon 
its sharpness. It should rather pride itself upon 
its childlike innocence — upon its verdant credulity. 
Charlatans do not flourish where dupes do not 
abound. There is nothing that Jonathan will not 
greedily swallow, from a new system of cosmogony 
to a manufactured mermaid, a woolly horse, or a 
belief that he is far too smart or 'cute to be taken 
in. The last is the well-known craze that brands 
personal, and therefore national credulity. We do 
not plume ourselves upon our smartness. We, in 
our modesty, thought it was ourselves who were to 
be the dupes of the Indirect Claims — not the 
voters who did not see through that most trans- 
parent of election " dodges." But it is not we who 
try to scrape wooden nutmegs. We call believers 
in Fanchette, and in the wretched revenants who 
talk in chairs and tables, by their proper and not 



42 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

complimentary names. It is we, alas ! who send a 
supply of Scotch journalists, Irish agitators and 
English adventurers to take advantage of a unique 
historical instance of national simplicity. Such 
is Jonathan's expressed admiration for smartness, 
that it is impossible to mistake it for anything but 
the common reverence of humanity for a quality 
most foreign to the nature of him who admires. 
In short, only flatter his belief in his own acute- 
ness, and you may get him to take in anything 
you please — and the harder it is to swallow, the 
more anxious he is to prove his strength of diges- 
tion by forcing it down. 

Of course, where there are dupes there will be 
charlatans of all kinds, but I contend that the 
greatest American charlatans whom we take for 
our conventional type are seldom native born. 
Nor do I forget the class, comparatively small 
as it is, of cultured Americans who believe that 
Boston is the intellectual centre of the world. 
Boston has reflected European culture not un- 
happily, but that scarcely removes the virtue of 
simplicity from those who fancy that America has 
a literature of her own. Nor, on the other hand, 



JONATHAN. 43 

do I forget the gross frauds, as gigantic beside the 
frauds of other lands as Niagara beside a Welsh 
waterfall. The more gigantic and impudent the 
fraud, the wider must be the field of those who 
have been taken in. So obvious is all this, that it 
is simply amazing how the typical Jonathan has 
ever found a place even in the airy world of inter- 
national illusions. With regard to other aspects 
of his distinctive character, the view is not so 
clear. He is certainly delightfully self-assertive, 
and that may be one result of his fundamental 
credulity. It may also be a reason for our taking 
him not for what he is, but for what he seems to 
be. But it must not be forgotten that national 
credulity is a pow T er in the world, and a very 
dangerous power. It implies earnestness — earnest- 
ness that may take the form of a life and death 
struggle for a false and deluded cause. If a man, 
or nation, is simple enough to believe that he has 
a mission, or that to grow rich is the whole duty 
of man, or that place-hunting is a worthy form of 
ambition, or that the welfare of the world depends 
upon the result of a party struggle, let his friends 
and neighbours beware. Credulity is almost 



44 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 

synonymous with fanaticism, and people may be 
fanatics, not only in faith or in politics, but in 
fashion or greed. And on the surface of the seeth- 
ing sea of wild and disordered fancies, demanded 
by an ever-devouring thirst for what is strange 
and new, will inevitably float the few who force 
their personality upon the careless eyes of the 
outer world. The bird of America is, in truth, 
less the eagle than the heron, and we have con- 
fused the hawk with the quarry on which it preys. 
No doubt where the herons gather there will the 
hawks abound. The result is not edifying : but 
we ought, at least, to be just enough not to hold 
the feeble gullibility of the typical many respon- 
sible for the unveiled voracity of the untypical few. 



( 45 ) 



VII. 

PATRICK. 

IRELAND is an exceptionally fortunate country. 
The accepted type of every other nation in the 
world is but a caricature of the reality, reproducing 
only its burlesque features, and not always even 
these. But the world has entered into a vast con- 
spiracy to paint Patrick in oil of roses instead of 
the ordinary distemper. Erin is the belle of the 
company of nations — made, not to take part in 
the rough struggle for existence, but to be petted, 
to laugh and be gay under the most adverse cir- 
cumstances, to live a rainbow life of April tears 
and smiles, and to be loved in a sentimental 
fashion in spite of a few charming faults, and 
because of many pleasant follies. Patrick has no 
responsibilities. All he has to do, in society and 



46 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

in literature, is to be frolicsome even to the point 
of head-breaking. The earth's circle is one gigantic 
horse-collar for him to grin through. He must 
enjoy everything, from a wake to a wedding, and 
when he is saddest you may be sure that some 
witty word is nearest to the tip of his tongue. 
Every school-boy, thanks to Lever and others, 
knows the typical Irishman. Barring a few 
scoundrels of informers, land agents, and attorneys, 
he is the most genial, jovial, hospitable, frank, 
easy-going, warm-hearted, amusing, affectionate, 
kind, generous, grateful, impulsive of human 
beings. It is as impossible to be seriously angry 
with Patrick as with a spoiled child, and the sharp 
word melts into sympathetic laughter at the 
drollery of his gambols. His slight dash of im- 
pudence and vulgarity only add a piquancy to this 

privileged child of nature. Above all, he overflows 

■ 
with robust life, and bears the carte blci7iche, which 

is the blessed brand of all men who have high 

animal spirits, and the courage to let themselves 

go. There are people who accuse him of being 

untruthful and uncomfortable in his habits. But 

he is a charming companion all the same — and, 



PA TRICK'. 47 

who looks for perfection in one who is labelled as a 
savage ? 

It once fell to my agreeable lot to arrive by 
train at Dublin in company with a typical Saxon. 
We took a car together to carry us to our hotel. 
After a minute or two my companion burst into a 
fit of laughter. As nothing very amusing had 
happened since we left our native shores I natur- 
ally asked the reason. " What witty fellows even 
the carmen are here ! " exclaimed the Saxon. 
" Fancy a London cabman saying anything like 
that ! " Now to my certain knowledge the only 
w r ords our driver had uttered were, " A car, your 
honour ? " But he was an Irishman, and whatever 
he said was to be laughed at accordingly. My 
companion felt himself bound to give our rather 
solemn and sour-faced carman credit for all the 
humour of tradition. And so it is throughout this 
wonderful island. In the matter of wit, for example, 
I very much fear that you take away the spirit if 
you take away the brogue, just as American 
humour evaporates if deprived of its real or 
imaginary nasality. It is the accent, not the 
matter, which we Cockneys laugh at, not with, 



48 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

in nine cases out of ten ; and there is no doubt an 
easy " way " about the " English " of pure Cork or 
Dublin quality that is itself the germ of laughter. 
Let everybody consider his experiences calmly. 
I have known witty Irishmen, but the witty 
Englishman is not quite unknown, while almost 
every Irishman is devoid of humour in the true 
sense of the word. A bull is neither wit nor 
humour, and collections of Irish wit and humour 
are nothing more than collections of unconscious 
bulls. Humour implies a readiness to give and 
take, not a propensity to answer a word with a 
blow. The Irishman has always been a duellist 
by nature, and it is doubtful if a duellist was ever 
conspicuous for a sense of humour. He cannot 
bear to think he is being laughed at, and is prone 
to suspect insult in the lightest word. Indeed, 
whatever he may have been once upon a time, 
when we knew nothing about him, the typical 
Patrick is generally rather a gloomy fellow, though 
seldom taciturn. And no wonder, considering his 
climate and his reputation — so galling to any man 
of spirit — of being little better than a hot-tempered, 
good-natured buffoon. Then again his leading idea 



PATRICK. 49 

is destructive of geniality. You cannot be in his 
company four minutes without hearing four terrible 
words — " The wrongs of Oireland." Be the colour 
he affects orange or green, the difference lies in 
nothing but hue. How his countrymen — the most 
popular and appreciated of races — are trampled on 
and despised, how his beautiful island is desolate 
with no one to aid her, how the penurious Saxon 
will not buy her railways, or transfer Manchester 
and Windsor to the Bog of Allen, make up the 
old, old story. Patrick is not only the typical 
Irishman, but the typical man with a grievance. 
He hears the " Melodies " running through a sym- 
phony of Beethoven. This perpetual self-conscious- 
ness is the key to his character. Patrick is not 
impudent. He is shy — and there is nothing that 
seems so like impudence as the self-assertion of a 
man who fancies that his claims are not allowed. 
He always feels that you are somehow holding 
him in hostility or ridicule. He even extends his 
suspicions to his own countrymen. The hatred of 
an Irishman for every other Irishman throws, in its 
intensity, the friendship of a Scotchman for every 
other Scotchman into the shade. Many will be 

4 



50 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

ashamed of being natives of their own country, 
even while they no less declaim about its wrongs. 
Patrick can never get it out of his head, falsely 
enough, that he belongs to an inferior, despised, 
and rejected nation, and insists upon his view till 
he almost makes the world think it the true one. 
He wastes himself in plaintive patriotism, and, with 
the sensitive temperament of unproductive genius, 
prefers to be trampled on and unhappy. In short, 
misery is his joy, for it gives him the right to be a 
martyr. At the same time, who can deny that the 
character which clings to defeat has necessarily 
much that is beautiful ? The Irishman can live 
and die for an idea, all the more triumphantly in 
proportion as it is hopeless and absurd. That is 
the highest praise that can be given to any man. 
Were it not for a quick eye to a bargain, and to 
getting all he can out of a scramble for places and 
pensions that entail no work, Patrick, though 
inclined to be a bore with his eternal wrongs, 
would have few essentially ignoble qualities. But 
there is something wrong about everything. If he 
is warm, he is seldom staunch ; if he is staunch, he 
probably has Scotch blood in him and is not 



PATRICK. 51 

genial. He is not ungrateful, but is gifted with 
the convenience of a very short memory. He is 
eminently hospitable, but he is quite as willing to 
be so at the expense of others as at his own. He 
receives favours as the payment of a debt, but 
bestows them as a matter of generosity. Alto- 
gether, he is as unintelligible to others as he is 
to himself; and what is more to the purpose, he 
wishes to be taken for what he is not, and by dint 
of eloquence succeeds. He is not frank, for he 
hides his thoughts and feelings from the prying 
Saxon as if his very existence were a State secret. 
Enough has surely been said to show that while 
the conventional Patrick is a piece of absurd, if 
delightful burlesque, the true Patrick is an enigma. 
Let us not, in our wild attempts to do him justice, 
forget to leave Ireland a few wrongs. No nation 
can ever be happy except in its own way, and if 
we were so happy as to succeed in making Ireland 
happy, Irishmen would be happy no more, 



52 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 



VIII. 

ALEXANDER. 

" Alexander, King of Macedon," as is well 
known, " conquered all the world but Scotland." 
Therefore the Scotchman may fairly call himself 
the greater Alexander whom friends affectionately, 
foes enviously, have corrupted into the undignified 
" Sandy," or even " Sawney." The Scotchman has 
many foes, and it is only doing him justice to say 
that he is more than a match for them. It is only 
the donkey that seeks to devour the thistle. 

Englishmen as a rule do not like Scotchmen, 
and have taken their cue from that arch-Philistine 
Dr. Johnson, who owes most of his fame to one 
of the nation he hated and despised — a singular 
instance of the process of heaping coals of fire. 



ALEXANDER. 53 

That cue has led to the present comedy character 
— the typical Alexander, as painted by the 
Southron. We do not go so far as to picture him, 
as Alphonse does, for ever dressed in a kilt and 
philabeg. That delusion has died away with the 
banishment of the splendid Highlander of our 
infancy from the tobacconists' doors, and survives 
only on the lyric stage, where Lucy of Lammer- 
moor w T ears the tartan of a Highland clan. But 
w r e do picture him for ever dressed in a character 
costume. He is red-haired, tall, with long limbs, 
harsh features, and high cheek-bones. His accent 
is unmistakable — the typical Alexander always 
hails from Aberdeen. The result of a post-mortem 
examination would be to find " Bawbee " written 
w T here Calais was engraved in the case of our First 
Mary. His skull is held to be of abnormal thick- 
ness, so that he does not laugh at a joke till three 
w r eeks after it is made, and not even then if the 
end of the third w r eek falls on Sunday. He alone 
can properly appreciate the poetry of Burns, 
seeing that he alone can understand what we are 
pleased to term its " Doric." He can, and does, 
drink at one sitting as much mountain dew as 



54 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 

would kill a miserable South Briton ; and, above 
all things, he is true and loyal to his friends to the 
marrow of his backbone. 

I like the feeling that leads a man first to 
think of his own blood, then of his father's friends, 
then of his countrymen, and not till afterwards 
of the rest of the world. It is honest, natural, 
and wholesome, giving human relationships the 
proper degrees of precedence. A man who cares 
for the world before his own kith and kin cannot 
care very warmly for anybody. A cosmopolitan 
philanthropist is a man with a very long title, but 
he is apt to forget that charity has anything to 
do with home — far less to remember that home is 
not a bad beginning. But as Scotchmen, even 
when personal enemies, will stand together like 
men of one clan, shoulder to shoulder, and will 
always help one another through thick and thin, 
it is impossible that we can be quite right in 
setting down the Scotchman as a cold-blooded 
animal. Froissart, with his " perfervidum ingeniurn 
Scotorum" the glowing Scotch nature, was nearer 
the mark than we. A man who is earnest about 
everything, must needs be calm, grave, and chary 



ALEXANDER. 55 

of words. And a Scotchman, the typical Alex- 
ander, is desperately earnest about everything — 
religion, politics, history, the poetry of Burns, the 
character of his own Queen Mary, the transcend- 
ental philosophy, the merits of haggis, — every- 
thing that touches Scotland, whether specially or 
as part of the universe. A Scotch sergeant is in 
earnest about his drill, a Scotch gardener about 
his roses, a Scotch schoolboy about his Latin. 
What is more, he is not, like the German, earnest 
only for his own or for his w r ork's sake. He is 
in earnest about human causes, past and present: 
and if they are hopelessly lost, unpopular, or 
unpractical, so much the better — he can throw 
himself into them more keenly. It was not the 
English Jacobites who survived Culloden, nor is 
it Englishmen who can launch themselves hotly 
into historic sympathies, not with any practical 
political view, but with the enthusiasm of chivalry. 
I think this to be at the root of the Scottish 
character — the feeling that makes every Scotchman 
a knight errant, not to say a Don Quixote, in 
some cause or other, in spite of a calculating turn 
proper to a poor country that has always been 



56 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

more fertile in pounds Scots than in pounds sterling. 
I cannot — who can ? — when thinking of Scotland, 
keep out of mind the names of Wallace, of Claver- 
house, of Walter Scott, of a hundred others who 
make a historic round table : and all out of one 
small nation not so populous as London alone. 
It is impossible to help a little enthusiasm : it is 
difficult not to confine oneself to combating more 
Scotorum the popular belief that the Scot is 
" canny," and that there the matter ends. No 
wonder that his literature, with one or two great 
exceptions, has been barren. Men who throw 
themselves into life are seldom writers, and so 
much the better for them. They are not apt to 
cultivate the graces of manner or style, and they 
are apt to be blind to the wit and humour that, as 
a rule, spring from the cynicism that finds in all 
earnestness something ridiculous. There is no 
doubt, consequently, that Scottish humour lacks 
wit, facility, and cruelty. Scotchmen have no turn 
for epigrams, and cannot understand them. There- 
fore, while there are no truer friends, there are 
many pleasanter companions : and Alexander 
himself generally prefers the congenial society of 



ALEXANDER. 57 

his own countrymen. He goes out into the great 
world, for by nature he is not provincial : but it 
is as an adventurer rather than as a colonist — to 
fight and overcome rather than to find a home. Of 
course, too, being very much in earnest, without 
appreciating the humour of circumstances, he is 
often stiff and shy — almost always close and 
reserved. But when he does let himself go, he 
goes with a vengeance. His hard head alone will 
carry him farther in a rapid race than other men. 
It is not only at social gatherings that he will be 
the last to fall beneath the table. The humour 
of Scotland lies in pathos — the protest of the 
warm heart against the rough outside and the 
hard brain — and what is there more pathetic in 
the world ? 

Such is Alexander. If you are not a fellow- 
countryman you may find him a dangerous rival — 
unscrupulous, even, for he is no more the slave of 
conviction when he is in the right than when he 
is in the wrong. He will not be ready to extend 
his sympathies to your hostile point of view : nor 
will he, because he happens to know you, feel 
bound to treat you as a friend. But if you need 



58 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

a friend, servant, or master on whom you can 
rely, make him one, and you will not repent to 
your dying day — as long as you do not speak ill 
of Robert Burns. 



( 59 ) 



IX. 

DAVID. 

David is the long for Taffy, a name intimately 
associated with Cambrian larceny and Saxon 
reprisal. It is interesting to observe how types 
form themselves in infancy. People who make 
tours in Wales continually complain of the way 
in which they leave their money upon the road 
with very little to show for it, either in the way 
of pleasure or information. The same accident 
is apt to happen to travellers elsewhere. But no 
one is taught in childhood that Hans or Alphonse 
carried off a leg of beef. That unfortunate 
nursery ballad is, I fear, at the root of the typical 
David, aided as it is by pictures of market 
women in steeple hats, and the absurd admission 
of Lindley Murray that W is a consonant and not 



60 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

a vowel. From these three elements — an un- 
feminine liking for beaver, and a tendency to 
consonants and larceny — the Saxon mind has, 
after the manner of Cuvier, who could construct 
a skeleton from a bone, evolved its typical Cam- 
brian. Mr. Matthew Arnold has but confused 
people's minds with his views of the Celtic ele- 
ment in literature and national character. We 
accept his views of course, because he ought to 
know. But we stand a little puzzled before a 
thief who has a genius for music and metaphysics, 
and a poet who cannot vocalise. There is no 
doubt that between the Welshman and the 
Englishman there is a great gulf fixed. We can- 
not learn his language, he will not learn ours. 
While our labourers are busy over pipes and beer, 
the Welsh hinds are recreating themselves with 
Calvin's five points and Eisteddfodau. Wales 
is still a foreign land — foreign in its language, its 
thoughts, and its ways. It is rather shameful 
that it should be so,' and that we should be con- 
tent to base our international knowledge on 
picture-books and primers. In the first place, it 
is a little unfair to set down David as a thief a 



DAVID. 61 

priori. I am not going to enter into a eulogy 
of all Welsh things, not having the advantage of 
being born beyond the Marches, and of being 
therefore, by right and duty, more hopelessly 
patriotic even than a cockney. But I must sug- 
gest, in justice to every Ap Hugh, Ap Morgan, 
and Ap Howell that a return should be moved 
for of the number of kid gloves presented to judges 
of assize, and of the district of Great Britain to 
which they were forwarded by the glover. That 
question being disposed of, it only remains to 
consider the Welshman, secondly as to what he 
is, and firstly as to what he is supposed to be. 

Secondly, then— it is appropriate in dealing 
with foreign matters to reverse the natural order 
of things — David is a Celt : a term which, as we 
use it often, must be assumed to mean something. 
He is intensely obstinate : he will not believe that 
the language of the bards is worse or less con- 
venient to him than our own. The Saxons, 
whose offspring we are proud to be, showed much 
the same sort of obstinacy after the battle of 
Hastings. He is singularly good at making a 
bargain, and looks upon the Englishman as na« 



62 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

tural food for plunder — a not uncommon error. 
He is facile and pliable, in spite of linguistic 
obstinacy, and tries to appear all things to all 
men, unless you touch his natural pride, when he 
flies out into shrill and towering passion. He is 
descended from Noah— of course no Englishmen 
are — and can trace his pedigree, which is certainly 
a distinction. He is born a Dissenter, and talks 
Radicalism in his cradle. I do not know that we 
have any other special views about Wales and 
the Welsh, except that our typical David lives 
among mountains, is familiar with goats and 
eagles, and exists principally upon butter and 
cheese. He is of course as cleanly, pious, moral, 
and avaricious as mountaineers traditionally are. 
"Point d' argent point de Suisse" — no money, no 
Welshman. Firstly, then — there is no doubt but 
that there are mountains in Wales, though goats 
and eagles are becoming obsolete. But as to his 
race, has it never struck those who have studied 
such matters at first, and not at second hand, 
that he is very different from other so-called Celtic 
races — the Irishman, the Manxman, and the High- 
lander ? The fact is, he has in him a large ad- 



DA VI D. 63 

mixture of the blood that conquered, not of 
that which was subdued. The language of Wales 
contains a Roman element, not the result of lite- 
rary importation, but bound up with common 
words. I must content myself with assertion, not 
having inclination to set out a philological voca- 
bulary. There is a popular tradition that the 
Romans drove the Britons into the Western moun- 
tains. So they did, and followed them, and there 
they remained w T hen the legions w r ere withdrawn. 
There are as many "Ponts" and "Strads" and 
so forth in Wales as in the kingdoms of Kent 
or Northumberland, and you will look for tokens 
of Danes and Saxons in vain. Now w 7 here the 
Celtic race has come in conflict with the Latin 
race, the latter has triumphed : and therefore, I 
take it, the Welshman has as much in him of the 
Roman as of the savage wiiom the Roman found. 
He is not brilliant like the true Celt : he has the 
plodding industry of the masters of the world. 
Like them he is stubborn, and stands on his dignity 
of race and person. He is grave and practical 
in his humour, with a tendency to rhetoric 
rather than poetry, which comes from the heart 



64 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

and not the brain. He has a stupidity peculiarly 
his own. It is not the gross stupidity peculiar 
to the Saxon boor, but it is that stupidity which 
will not permit a man to understand that he is a 
provincial. A Welshman cannot get it out of his 
head that he belongs to the greatest, most im- 
portant, most central race in the world. To him 
London is provincial : he is in the world's capital 
when he is in his own country town. His an- 
cestors the Romans thought the same — the only 
difference being that they managed to impress 
their belief upon other people too. But, as the 
modern Welshman cannot do that, he makes up 
for it by acting as though he had done so. To 
sneer or speak lightly of Wales, to say that 
Welshwomen are not the most beautiful in the 
world, that Welsh music is not the most musical, 
Welsh poetry not the most poetic, Welsh mutton 
not the tenderest — as in fact it is — Welsh scenery 
not the loveliest, Welshmen not the cleverest, 
Wales not the most wonderful, is to elicit a cry 
of agony. He bristles with prickles, and if you 
touch his country you touch him. Being essen- 
tially provincial, he is, if not necessarily narrow- 



DA VID. 65 

minded, devoid of the urbane humour, and there 
is no doubt that the typical Welshman is rather 
prone to be suspicious of his friend. Mutual trust 
and confidence is not the result of a life bound up 
with country villages. It comes from wide know- 
ledge of the world, and the world the true Welsh- 
man does not care to know. He is not at home 
out of Wales, and carries his native valley on his 
back wherever he goes. But, if he does not trust 
his friends, how shall he trust the stranger ? 
" Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes " — I fear the 
Saxons, though they bring us gifts — was put into 
the mouth of the Trojan, a common ancestor of 
Wales and Rome. If we think he wants to cheat 
us, he thinks we want to cheat him. That is the 
true philosophy of the story of the mutton bone, 
which, after all, cuts both ways. The Welshman 
would be like the Roman if he could. He is as 
philosophic, as literary, as obstinate, as patriotic, 
as dignified in all his tendencies. If England were 
not England, he would no doubt condescend to be 
less provincial and more imperial. As things are, 
he might fairly accept facts, and, by becoming 
more English, become yet more Roman. 

5 



66 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 



X. 

JOHN. 

THERE is, of course, nothing remarkable in the 
fact that Alphonse, Hans, David, Patrick, and the 
rest of them draw strange pictures of John. But 
it is not a little peculiar to notice how curiously 
careful he is to misrepresent and caricature himself. 
One would think us to be the shyest country in 
the world, or else the most cunning, to see the way 
in which we throw about printer's ink, as if we 
were all literary cuttle fish, to blind the eyes of our 
friends and foes. We delight in looking at our- 
selves neither as we are, nor as we wish to be. 
We laugh at the red-haired, long-whiskered and 
sloping-shouldered imbecile, with the long teeth, 
who stands in the Charivari for " Sir Brown, 
Milord Anglais," but we do not treat ourselves 



JOHN. 67 

with any greater fidelity to nature. " The English 
painted by themselves " make up not a portrait 
gallery, but a museum of monstrosities. I do not 
quarrel with my countrymen for claiming a mono- 
poly in the name of John. I have known a few 
Englishmen who were christened otherwise, but on 
the whole I suppose there are few families in which 
the name of John is entirely unknown. It certainly 
has a curious affinity to the name of Smith, which, 
oddly enough, has no correlative among the Latin 
races. But I do quarrel with our choosing to add 
to the name of John the surname of Bull. That 
yery unhappy thought of Arbuthnot has been pro- 
ductive of evil that is something more than merely 
pictorial. John Bull is even still the conventional 
Englishman. I am ashamed to recall his charac- 
teristics. He is a bumpkin, a clown, and a boor. 
His gross, stupid animalism speaks in every feature 
and every limb. He is bloated, red-faced, and 
weighs twenty stone. He not only eats beef till 
he becomes bovine, but drinks beer till he thinks 
beer, and habitually wears top-boots in the draw- 
ing-room. The comic journals of a country are 
generally supposed to reveal its true characteristics, 



68 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

grotesquely, if you will, in manner, but faithfully 
in spirit. Therefore we know what will be thought 
of us in future times. Not only so, but we have 
taken a traditional kind of shame-faced pride in 
the lout whom we dare to call a likeness of our- 
selves. His very girth we account a grace, and 
distrust any but the brutal virtues. No wonder 
that other nations take us at our word and hold us 
for the bites that we claim to be. 

We are most of us still proud of being English- 
men. But the justice of our pride lies in the fact 
that we are in every respect unlike John Bull. If 
we weighed twenty stone, could we be the best 
horsemen to be found after the Tartars ? Could 
we lead the way up the Alps, and win the race to 
the North Pole ? Were we bumpkins, clowns, or 
boors, could we be the most aristocratic of all 
nations, next to none — with a passion for comfort, 
which is only another name for the highest sort of 
refinement, and a fastidiousness which is in itself 
a mark of a thin moral skin ? Were we mere 
broad shouldered but narrow-minded Minotauri — 
but science, commerce, literature, stand wonder- 
struck at the idea. No : we have our faults, but 



JOHN. 69 

these are not of them. On the contrary, our faults 
are precisely the reverse of those of John Bull. I 
cannot say the same of merits, for the conventional 
John Bull has no merits either in body or soul, to 
judge from his personal appearance, except a look 
of apoplectic health and a purse well provided. 

The main characteristic of the true John — not 
Bull — is that he has no common characteristic at 
all. There is no typical Englishman. It is easy to 
distinguish an Englishman at a glance from a 
foreigner, but that is the result of his individuality, 
not of his nationality. Of a foreigner whose indi- 
vidual character is strongly pronounced physically, 
and who shaves sufficient to show it, we invariably 
say " He looks like an Englishman." This is 
what Goldsmith meant by calling us a nation of 
humorists. Our minds and thoughts vary as 
much as our climate, and our bodies as much as 
our minds. Hence almost every man has tastes 
and ways that render him strange to his fellow- 
countrymen. It has been observed of a French 
crowd at a great spectacle, that every man has the 
same impulse at the same moment, and expresses 
it in the same word. If one exclaims " magnifiqite" 



70 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

all exclaim " magnifique" if one superbe, all superbe 
— not taking it up one from another, but in chorus, 
as if there were but one voice to the crowd. In 
England, though we are slaves to fashion, out of 
a self-consciousness of our individual eccentricities, 
unanimous impulse is almost unknown. It is not 
we who experience panics in battle : and if fire 
panics are not unknown that is because we are 
human beings, and women are in such cases 
mingled with men. This characteristic takes a 
twofold form. Some it makes selfishly intolerant : 
others it throws into eager sympathy with the 
thoughts and workings of other minds. We are the 
most bigoted of bigots when we are sure we are 
right : the most timid of sceptics when we are 
not sure that we are not wrong. In fact, an open- 
minded Englishman, as most Englishmen are when 
young, is seldom quite sure of his own mind. 
There are so many ideas floating round him, with 
somebody to say something for all of them, that 
he must perforce take refuge either in bigotry or 
scepticism. So he temporises, and contents him- 
self in practice with what is certain, finding in 
tradition and in conventional custom a substitute 



JOHN. 7i 

for the trouble of having to make up his opinions. 
Therefore the Englishman is essentially a " respect- 
able " man. He leads the common life of those 
immediately about him, not so much because he 
thinks it right, as because he has to choose between 
the comfort he loves and the very uncomfortable 
strain of perpetual self-assertion. At last submis- 
sion becomes a habit, and he looks upon displays 
of eccentricity as rather weak-minded — as, in fact, 
they mostly are. The result of this is, however, a 
greater amount of unconscious hypocrisy than can 
well be found in any other part of the world. You 
can scarcely ever tell what an Englishman really 
is from what he seems. Indeed, so much does 
prudent common sense teach him to subdue his real 
nature that it is not unfair to judge by contraries. 
We are always astonishing one another, and we 
seldom know even our dearest friends till chance 
breaks down the icy barriers of habit, and shows 
that Englishmen are men. We hold ourselves back 
till the occasion comes : and that I take to be the 
cause of our enduring strength, which we do not 
exhaust by frittering it away in hourly outlettings. 
There is no doubt, however, that while strength is 



72 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

increased by repression, readiness of emotion is 
destroyed. The emotional artistic temperament 
is produced by indulgence and cultivation. And 
so among us genius must, in order to be recognised, 
dare more, and dare to be more eccentric, than in 
countries where singularity is not looked upon as a 
sign of weakness. So, also, the pursuit of the arts 
most allied to genius is still, among us, looked 
upon as a mark of singularity like a bizarre 
costume. Like other people we cannot be : and 
so to be like other people is, of course, our aim. 
Failure makes us perhaps a little awkward, and 
gives us a reputation for want of sympathy which 
we are really the last to deserve. "As many 
men, so many minds." He differs essentially from 
Alphonse by keeping up the traditions and the 
spirit of courtesy. From Hans by caring more 
for the results of work than for work as in itself an 
end, from Giuseppe by readiness to spend, from 
Juan by richness of nature, from AH by origi- 
nality, from Jonathan by incredulity, from Alex- 
ander by love of comfort, from Patrick by a sense 
of humour, from David by being able to appreciate 
the fact that there are other people besides himself 



JOHN, 73 

in the world. But he almost resembles the Welsh- 
man in his belief that his own country is the centre 
and capital of the universe, the Scotchman in his 
want of expansion, the Irishman in his physical 
activity, the American in his love of all things 
new, the Oriental in his slavery to fashion, the 
Spaniard in superstition, the Italian in versatility, 
the Frenchman in being the biped which is called 
man. Enough, however, has been said to show 
that, if not the pleasantest nation in the world we 
are certainly the most remarkable : and that with 
all our faults we are not, in our type, a horde of 
boors or bulls. 



FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 



FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 



i. 

AMONG THE "GODS." 

The Romans had their first-class gods and their 
second-class gods. So we, who imitate them in so 
many things, have our " gods " who pay sixpence 
for the privilege of Olympus and our gods who 
pay half-a-crown for a more exalted elysium, 
To-night, while we have five sixpences, we mount 
into the loftier region. We are at the Opera. 

Your ladyship thinks that the opera is made 
for such as you ? You, bouquet-bearing mortal 
that you are, are unaware, even with the aid of a 
lorgnette, of the presence of those who sit in a 
world above the chandelier. You do not even 



78 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

glance up at them : but they, in a double sense, 
look down on you. They are a conceited race, 
though yours is the highway of the crush-room, 
theirs the byeway of the back-stairs. They are 
the true fanatici per la musica, not you, who put 
on kid gloves, and arrive comfortably in your 
carriage at the end of the overture. Music, like 
war, is no kid-gloved affair with them. Long 
before the doors open they crowd through the 
narrow entrance and up the steep and stuffy 
stairs that lead to their paradise : for a good 
three-quarters of an hour they rejoice in purga- 
tory and breathe without oxygen. And then the 
rush when the bolts are drawn ! You would not 
do as much were the ghost of Pasta to return to 
take a last " farewell." Well may they think it is 
to them that singers sing. Well may they expect 
some gratitude for going through so much to hear 
what, alas, often in these degenerate days turns 
out to be so little. The sixpenny gods are easily 
pleased. Not so these. Hard seats and a hard 
fight to gain them do not conduce to the languid 
satisfaction proper to the boxes. They talk 
between the acts : and then, how they criticize ! 



AMONG THE " GODS." 79 

They seem to enjoy being displeased better than 
being pleased. But their opinion, unless, like 
Mezzofanti, one knows all the languages in the 
world, is hard to gather. There is a lot of 
German clerks, who have come, a volunteer claque, 
to applaud Fralilein Katzkorff for old recollections' 
sake of Vienna or Berlin. There sit Monsieur 
and Madame, with the little Alphonse and the 
little Alphonsine, for all the world as if they were 
at home in the Porte St. Martin. These wear a 
solemn air — to them, the theatre is a function : to 
the Germans, a recreation only lacking beer. By 
your side sits the twin brother of the Garibaldino 
who, after a long day's march to Milan, spent his 
only sou, not in maccaroni, but in a thousandth 
hearing of " La Sonnambula." This one, for to- 
night's sake, will starve for seven days. Be you 
of what country you may, you will find fellow 
countrymen — and fellow country-women, too — 
with whom to fraternise, where liberty, equality, 
and fraternity, politically and socially, are the 
order of the day. It reeks with Bohemian air. 
The English element is less interesting. It is 
indeed less important, for you may sometimes 



80 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

sit out a whole performance, and not hear an 
English word. Of course there are specimens 
of that indescribable order of beings who are 
found everywhere, and resemble nothing but flies 
in amber. But most are able to point out with 
pride some member of the chorus or orchestra 
whom somebody that they know knows : or 
others of whom are themselves struggling music 
teachers or musicians, who have been extrava- 
gant enough to spend upon the art that starves 
them the hard earnings of half a day : and these 
are the devoutest listeners of all. But only avoid 
the old gentleman who " Saw Grisi, sir, in her best 
days/' the middle-aged gentleman who is always 
losing his place in his libretto, and the bandsman 
off duty who drums with his heels to the music, 
and you will do very well You can talk when 
you want to talk, and listen when you want to 
listen. What habitue of the stalls can do more ? 

It was among the gods that De Quincey 
dreamed opium dreams, listening in the intervals 
of Grassini's song to the music of the Italian 
language talked by Italian women. Perhaps 
opium had something to do with this last plea- 



AMONG THE " GODS." 81 

sure : for Italian talked by Italians is not the 
most musical tongue in the world. Let us, 
therefore, return to the music of the English 
language, as it is spoken by English women in 
the stalls. It may disturb the performance : but 
for that I am too patriotic to care — and, as I have 
already said, the seats of the gods are very hard. 



6 



82 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 



II. 

AMONG THE STARS. 

WHEN a troupe of travelling musicians — I trust 
that prime donne will pardon the use of a title 
that they share with the stars of fairs — arrives in 
a country town, it is received with some amount 
of awe. Such names as Corbacchione and Barba- 
gianni, hitherto known only from the musical 
advertisements and criticisms of The Times, become 
no longer symbols for abstract ideas, but names 
of audible men and women. No lady of well 
regulated mind would receive them as guests : nor 
does she so make any unfitting sacrifice of charity 
in many cases. But she, especially if she is herself 
an amateur, feels a half sympathetic interest, 



AMONG THE STARS. 83 

tinged, of course, with the sweet flavour of impro- 
priety in them and their ways. The waiters and 
chambermaids of the Royal Hotel, where they 
take up their quarters, are of course in the rela- 
tion of the valet to the hero. But in the concert- 
room what mysterious glory exhales from the 
brow of the finely if not very tastefully dressed 
lady who, every time she opens her lips, gains 
for herself or her farmer — for prime dorine are 
generally bought or hired — the price of a farm ! 
It is of course presumed, even by those who know 
nothing of her but what they hear — in a double 
sense — that she is a woman like other women. 
But somehow people who read novels, which now 
very considerably run into art matters, take her 
as the representative of a great, poetic, and 
romantic career. If they go to the theatre, they 
see her fed with applause, and turned into a living 
statue of Flora. If they meet her in society, 
they are themselves a little disappointed with her 
style, but she is so surrounded by courtiers that 
they are ashamed to own their disappointment 
even to themselves. If they read the papers, they 
read of her as if she were something altogether 



84 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

divine. Even her faults of style or intonation are 
discussed with more solemnity than if they were 
those of a statesman. The Chinese used to think 
that there was no world outside their great wall. 
So does the world of amateurs consider themselves 
the outside Tartars, who look with longing eyes 
upon the flowery fields, as they deem them, of 
song. 

Far different to the amateur is the star. She 
has been brought up to the trade, and knows its 
traditions. I am talking, remember, of an imagi- 
nary orb. She is the vocal representative of a 
glorious art — an art more soul-absorbing than 
painting or poetry. Once, perhaps, she possessed 
a little private enthusiasm of her own. Talk to 
her now, and you will not be called upon to strain 
your transcendental faculties. She will be best 
pleased if you confine yourself to praise of herself, 
and finding fault with her rivals. Not that she is 
naturally jealous or more than ordinarily vain, but 
business is business, and all is fair in trade as in 
war. Besides, self-belief is a habit very easy to 
acquire. She knows beforehand from what part of 
the house the applause begins, where there is to be 



AMONG THE STARS. 85 

an encore. She will even keep her show song back 
to produce at the right moment. In that case, if 
there is no encore, she will take one, all the same. 
Her happiness in many of the bouquets thrown to 
her must be small : she likes money, and bills 
run high in Covent Garden, or in the marche aax 
fleurs. If, as is commonly the case, she has a 
fair share of common sense, she knows that the 
people who crowd round her like moths round a 
candle, are swept together by reflected vanity, or 
by interest. They wish either to be patrons or 
proteges. She finds no pleasure in delighting the 
few who run after her voice, or her skill, or the 
thousands who admire her because it is the 
fashion. Her aspiration is a villa on the lake of 
Como, with nothing to do : and when that is 
fulfilled, she continues to take an interest not in 
art, but in gossip about its personnel. She is, gene- 
rally speaking, a very good sort of woman, in spite 
of what people may say : but to entwine a prima 
donna with poetic wreaths, is about as absurd as 
to treat a cobbler as though, because his boots 
were the fashion, he ought to have a public statue. 
He does the best for himself, and so does she. 



S6 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

The true enthusiast, the true artist in song seldom 
becomes a star. She — perhaps — has the reward 
ascribed to virtue. A star may be glorious in 
itself, it is true : but far more often it shines 
with reflected light, and fashion is its sun. 



( §7 ) 



III. 

AMONG THE GRASSHOPPERS. 

The noisy insect into which Aurora turned Ti- 

thonus sings, says the legend, not because it 
chooses to sing, or because its song is sweet. It 
sings because sing it must, unceasingly, until 
it bursts in pieces with the perpetual strife to sing. 
The latest addition to the live stock of a certain 
horrible old crone who traded upon the beggary of 
children must have had the blood royal of Tithonus 
in her veins. I will come to her presently. Mean- 
while, enough and to spare has been said of musical 
miseries. All the world asserts that barrel organs, 
ballad singers, pifferari, and errant bands are a 
nuisance of the order intolerable. All the world 
thinks — though it dares not own — that " benefit " 
concerts, which benefit nobody ; " recitals," which 
mean a solo performance upon a private trumpet, 



8$ FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

musical mornings, musical evenings, musical parties, 
musical festivals, musical amateurs, connoisseurs, 
professors, critics, and charlatans, are but the 
development of a street nuisance upon a drawing- 
room-scale. Talk of the pleasures of music ! Its 
pleasures are like the visits of angels : its miseries 
are as much with us as are the poor. Hateful 
though it may be in politics, in Art there is no 
principle so sound as that of " Liberty, Fraternity, 
Equality " — above all, " Equality/' the key-note of 
the three-hued symphony. The uncritical audience 
of yonder Savoyard — the earliest instructor that 
our princess of cicalce knew in our earliest years — is 
listening for music's, not for fashion's sake. Beppo 
himself is playing for a no more ignoble cause 
than that which evokes the song of his more 
aristocratic compatriots in the opera house across 
the way. What is the essential difference between 
the two ? Every now and then an artist astonishes 
the stage by showing that the lyric soul may have 
room for other things than a weekly salary. But 
the street also is not without its artists, who, if not 
so great in reputation, are in spirit equally true. 
The owners of fastidious ears will doubtless prick 



AMONG THE GRASSHOPPERS, 89 

them with wonder. But I say boldly that of the 
few artists, worthy of this much-abused name, to 
whom I have listened w r ith a feeling that they 
stood in a world wherein criticism becomes only 
another name for impertinence, two hold a fore- 
most and yet a common rank. One sang for glory 
and for glory's gilded frame : the other for halfpence 
without any glory that needed gilding. But, with 
both, it was Art that stood above and in front of all. 
Poor child ! It is hard to call what in others 
is termed a graceful accomplishment, idle 
vagabondism in you. Is not vagabondism the 
very sign and seal of the artist nature — and in 
what way is it more blameable to wander 
from London street to London street than from 
Vienna to San Francisco ? Perhaps you have 
gipsy blood in your veins, and are a wanderer by 
right of race as well as by right of nature. Has it 
ever been remarked that nine street singers out of 
ten have black hair and tawny skins ? This girl's 
hair is as black as ebony, and her complexion — 
but that is not so easy to tell. We are standing 
not far from Bow Street, where the law is investi- 
gating the rights and wrongs of the wretched 



90 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

Beppo. Beppo also is a grasshopper ; and his 
compelling fate is the padrone. But listen. "That 
is not a bad voice," you say : "who knows what it 
might have been with training ? " " Not a bad 
voice," indeed ! It is a glorious voice : and, as to 
training, it is not so much instruction as oppor- 
tunity that is needed to make it that of a Sontag 
or of a Malibran. She is the very queen of grass- 
hoppers, though her robes are tatters. Her com- 
pelling fate is Nature. Her blind soul does not 
know it : but it is not for the sake of stray 
halfpence that she wastes her treasure. As for 
what her life is when she is not singing vile words 
to viler tunes — well, it may be no worse than if she 
had been an opera queen — a queen, not among 
grasshoppers, but among dragon-flies. There are 
countries in which she would have been caught 
and trained. London is not one of them. We are 
ants : we have no fellow-feeling with grasshoppers. 
The rattle of our streets drowns all but the song of 
the lark, who sings to the skies alone, though he 
cannot see them through his prison-bars, and to 
the sod which has to stand to him for the whole 
green world. In a few months' time her song will 



AMONG THE GRASSHOPPERS. 91 

be cracked and hoarse, with London rain and 
wind and fog, and worse things even than these. 
In a year, where will she be ? Perhaps she will 
have followed her dead voice : perhaps she in her 
turn will have turned impresario, of beggar children. 
In either case, Nature has mocked Art by bestow- 
ing one of the sweetest and most gracious of her 
gifts in vain. But mere street ballad singer, street 
beggar as she is, and will have been to the end, 
she will have done more than most of us. 
Scarcely one in a generation bears the fruit of 
song — how few even bear the blossom ! Is it to 
enter into the forbidden world to fancy that 
Nature gives not one of her gifts in vain — that 
song, though existing but in promise, is the true 
soul of a born artist, be she prima donna assoluta 
or be she but prima cicala — first of grasshoppers ? 
In that case, when you hear a street singer, with 
her hoarse, cracked voice, think, not of the torment 
to your eyes and ears, but of what she might have 
been. This is no fable, though it set out with 
one. The grasshopper, with her one strident note, 
is not the less a singer because she is slain by 
song. 



92 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 



IV. 

AMONG THE STALKS. 

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the making of 
nosegays was one of the simplest arts known in 
Eden or anywhere. Nothing was needed but to 
pull a handful of cowslips from the nearest 
meadow, or of anemones from the hedge, and to 
bind the stalks together with a tendril of the wild 
clematis, which some call traveller's joy. But we, 
in our cleverness, have changed all that, even 
though we may not go quite so far as Sganarelle, 
who, on his own authority, transferred the heart 
from the left to the right side. It is probable that 
the hearts of men and women are where they 
have always been, and that all who have been 
children have in them still a quiet place for wild 
flowers. Only the ingenuity of florists has raised 



AMONG THE STALKS. 93 

a wire fence between the heart and the blossoms 
that nature bids it fear. 

Bouquets — I cannot call them by so unprimi- 
tive a word as nosegays — are now manufactured 
by w r iring together into a symmetrical pattern 
gaudy petals and heavily-fragrant blossoms, while 
the stalks are thrown away as an incumbrance to a 
kid-gloved hand. Covent Garden, wherein we are 
now 7 standing, is the metropolis of these bouquets. 
But it is something more. It is itself a bouquet. 
Here are not only the bright petals of flowers but 
of flower buyers, who lay down gold with hands 
that would grace Aurora. Here is not only the 
scent of blossoms, but the perfume of the memories 
of the Piazza's flowery days. And here also are the 
stalks that are thrown away. 

I do not mean only the stalks of cabbages, the 
empty pods of peas and beans, and the thorny 
shreds through which roses drew their life from the 
soil before they had been transplanted from the 
bed to the bouquet. Everybody knows Covent 
Garden at noon. Then it is in blossom. Most 
people know it, or rather have seen it — for the 
knowledge of the early sparrow 7 is shared with few 



94 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

— in the fresh, cold dawn, when market gardens, 
like very woods of Birnam, march into London as 
into another Dunsinane, bearing with them their 
diamonds of country dew. Even the tenants of 
front rooms in the innumerable inns overlooking 
the waggons do not complain of a clamour that 
wakes them only to send them to sleep again. 
But it is not always noon or dawn. Covent 
Garden is not always the Convent Garden — a city 
sanctuary where rose abbesses rule over lily and 
violet nuns — a floral cathedral in the midst of an 
unfragrant world. There are some few hours of 
night when even Covent Garden tries to sleep, and 
when the stalks forget in dreams that they have 
forgotten to bear flowers. 

She who sleeps in a torpor of exhaustion, 
among baskets for pillows, and with the night air 
for her covering, is a stalk. She is a stalk that 
once upon a time — how long ago it seems ! — drew 
from the soil the sap that feeds the flowers. Her 
pillow then was that of health and growth : her 
coverlet the air of home. There is more in his 
doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants than even 
Gothe, its inventor, knew. He called the develop- 



AMONG THE STALKS. 95 

ment of flowers from roots a progression not from 
imperfection to perfection, but from strength to 
weakness — from health to disease. First comes 
the stem or stalk, firmly planted in the soil of 
earth, which, for flowers, never ceases to be the soil 
of Eden. Then the branches spread themselves as 
if to grasp all the outer air. Then, as the sap 
grows weaker, come the leaves, to shield the plant 
from the very sunshine towards which it strains. 
Lastly, break out the flowers, to end either in 
seasonable fruit, or in — a bouquet, to be gathered, 
carried through a ball-room or crush-room, 
caressed, and tossed aside. So from above that 
woman, who sleeps, let us hope, and dreams, we 
may be sure, among the refuse both of roses and 
of cabbages, may we, in like fashion, draw aside 
the transparent foliage of her dreams, until the 
constable's bull's-eye flashes upon her from the 
piazza and warns her that there is no rest for such 
as she. The artificially wired blossoms have long 
ago — or lately, what matters it ? — dropped away 
from their wires. The leaves are no longer there 
either to shelter from the scorching sun, or to 
receive the freshness of the rain. The root is torn 



96 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

up from the soil This is the process of the manu- 
facture of a bouquet. And what has become of the 
stalk? It lies here among the rejected waste of 
Covent Garden, whence Waterloo-bridge is not fan 
It may be thither that the glare of the lantern will 
bid this human stalk "move on," and our great 
river will carry to the sea the refuse of a garland. 
Yes, Covent Garden is in every sense a bouquet. 
Its market-place is the very type of those who 
snatch among its shreds and refuse such dreams as 
may come between the close of a black night and 
the coming of a misty morning, bringing with it 
the cartwheels of the busy day to crush into the 
mire the stalks that had once borne blossoms in- 
the fields. 



( 97 



V. 

AMONG THE BLIGHT. 

In my wanderings to discover the saddest possible 
thing that the world contains, I thought it fit to 
confine myself in the first place to my own country, 
and in the second place to London, simply because 
England contains London, and London contains 
all things. But once lodged here, the search 
became more difficult. It was hard to choose 
between the arches of the river-bridges, the prisons, 
and the drawing-rooms. But at last I came to a 
door, on the lintel of which suddenly flashed out 
the word "Eureka? It was a hospital for sick 
children. I am not going to describe its locality or 
its organisation. It is a bad principle to satisfy at 
second hand the curiosity that ought to satisfy 
itself by becoming charity. But does any one 

7 



98 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

remember how sometimes, when the morning is 
young and the glass is at " set fair," when there is 
not a cloud in the sky, and the day lives in hope 
instead of memory, there comes an obscure dark- 
ness which is not mist, or the presage of fertilizing 
rain ? The country people call it " blight," and its 
whole purpose is to destroy. It is one of those 
instruments of nature that seem to us to be wholly 
malevolent. Thunderstorms, though they devastate 
the fields, have their benevolent as well as their 
glorious side. But blight, though less widely 
destructive, is both wholly hideous and wholly 
evil. 

Here is one little child, who has seen eight 
years, of which each has been a winter. It was 
not born a cripple. Had its mother been a negress 
or a Sioux, its limbs would be as straight and its 
life as strong as that of any of its brothers and 
sisters who are brought up in the forcing houses 
that we call nurseries. Its sin has been that it was 
born in the most civilized city in the world, over 
one half of which the sun shines gloriously, while 
over the other half— or is it more than half? — 
spreads the stormless blight of bad nursing, worse 



AMONG THE BLIGHT. 99 

food, and worst air. That day should end in night, 
is fitting : but that the twelve hours of midnight 
should strike with the first hour of dawn — have I 
not discovered the saddest sight in the world ? 
Look at those small rays of hands, which nature 
made to grow till they could wield the axe or 
hammer, and which our second nature might have 
taught even to hold the pen. Look how the 
features, w T hich were meant to smile till strong life 
made them grave, have in eight years of childhood 
only learned to express the patience of hopeless 
resignation. Look at the limbs that ought to be 
stretching themselves out into the air of the fields, 
even if only into the fields of St. Martin or of 
St. Giles, striving with those of other children, not 
which can run the fastest, but which can lie most 
still. And then turn from bed to bed, and think 
upon the suffering of innocence — a paradox which 
is purely human : and of how that suffering falls 
hardest upon the children of the poor, who most of 
all need the strength of shoulders and of hands. 
These cannot compensate for defects of body by 
the triumph of mind over the strength or over the 
weakness of matter. Here is another child that 



ioo FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

has undergone one of the most terrible operations 
of surgery : another whose life is only being pro- 
longed for a few short months in order that it may 
die of disease instead of starvation — each, unable 
to reach out his hands, reaching out his eyes, with 
touching greed, for the wooden horse, or piece of 
coloured card, that stands to him for so much of 
the universe as is not contained in the words 
deformity and disease. Even if any one of these 
lives to be old in years, he will never have known 
what it is to be young. The day of life is reversed, 
and the infant is born into the seventh age. 

And yet, in the midst of premature disease, and 
in the face of death, who comes hand in hand with 
birth, one sees through the veil of blight the outline 
of something which is not that of the destroying 
angel. We are in London, and in the midst of 
roaring streets and stifling lanes. But through the 
shadow the passing wheels are unheard, and the 
reek of the close courts is filtered and purified. If 
the blight has forced its way within the walls — if 
the sunshine and the showers are left without, it 
has called forth the care of human gardeners who 
neglect too much the wild and healthy blossoms 



AMONG THE BLIGHT. 101 

that are exposed to the scorching of the sun and 
the rush of the storm. If only there could be a 
children's hospital for all — for the strong plants as 
well as for the weak, for lives that need to be 
restrained, as well as for lives that need to be 
saved ! These sad, sickly, but resigned faces, these 
feeble but patient hands, these minds closed to all 
tfie evils of the world but one, all these children 
who are, save in innocence, all things that children 
ought not to be, have learned in childhood the 
fiction, better than truth, that the earth is ruled by 
kindness, and the truth that death is not a thing 
to be feared. No : sad, unaccountable as it is that 
blight should be carried by the breeze that carries 
day-break, I must wander farther before I can 
say that I have found the saddest thing in the 
world. 



102 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 



VI. 
AMONG THE CATERPILLARS. 

ROSE is the best possible tint for spectacle glasses. 
They render the poverty of other people invisible, 
they give pleasant names to unpleasant things, 
they call a spade anything except what it really 
is, and by a severe process of translation, have 
turned Grub Street, St. Mary Axe, into Milton 
Street, in the same unsavoury locality. But no 
spectacles however exquisitely tinted, can turn a 
caterpillar into a butterfly. If they could, how 
glorious the world w T ould be — and how full the 
Abbey would be of tombs ! But, as things are, 
the ways that Goldsmith trod are trodden still. 
We often bandy compliments about Grub Street 
being no more : but we do not change things by 
changing names. 



AMONG THE CATERPILLARS. 103 

It is difficult to be geographically exact. But 
the modern Grub Street — I like to use the good 
old name ; it is redolent of poetry and of pathos, 
in spite of its unpoetic sound — may be taken to lie 
within a circle of byeways that radiate from Covent 
Garden as a centre. To you, that quarter of 
London, our mother of mystery, is but the land 
of music, of theatres, of late suppers, and of early 
peas. This is because you keep to the highivays 
of the world. Turn down this narrow winding 
alley and enter this untempting tavern door. You 
must not mind if your rose-coloured lenses are 
dimmed by the smoke of shag, by the fumes of 
malt, and by clouds of spirituous steam. You will 
see typified for you many another tavern in many 
another winding alley within the cast of a stone. 
You have passed the threshold of a land wherein 
all things are upside down. 

The " Wormwood Arms" — that will pass for 
a generic name — is a dilapidated house of the days 
of the earlier Georges. It possesses historic and 
classic traditions. But it is a failure now : and it 
is here that gather the Failures — men who have 
taken to the underground ways of literature because 



104 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

they were, or more probably thought themselves, 
unfitted for safer and easier ways. Has it ever 
occurred to those who study the secret of success 
to fathom the philosophy of failure ? They will 
here find a whole hospital of cases. These men 
are the caterpillars, who, with the making of 
butterflies in them, will never become butterflies. 
Each lacks some one little thing — each has some 
slight moral or mental twist that keeps him under 
the water of life, on which many a worse man 
triumphantly swims. There is nothing so terribly 
bitter as to be almost good enough — to miss the 
centre by just the fraction of a line when to miss, 
even by the fraction of a line, is to fail. Make up 
to Jack Hacker, there in the corner which is by 
prescription. From one, learn all. He is a wit 
and a scholar — nay, he is a gentleman, though a 
rough one, still in spite of loud talk and a suit of 
clothes that would disgrace a militiaman in mufti. 
He keeps himself from starving by his pen, not 
even himself knows how, but beyond that he has 
always failed. He was the son of a man of 
fortune, even of rank, and was intended for the 
Church or the Bar. But he was plucked for his 



AMONG THE CATERPILLARS. 105 

Little-go, though capable of examining for honours. 
He never played billiards without just missing 
the stroke that was to ensure him victory. He 
never backed a horse but it was beaten by a neck. 
He never wrote a line, good or bad, but he was 
told that " it would very nearly do." He missed 
winning a wife — a girl whom he treasures still in 
his heart in a secret and shamefaced way — just 
because, as ill-luck would have it, he in those days 
the soberest of men, drank one glass too much — 
he has often done so since, poor fellow ! — on the 
eve of his wedding day. By just one second he 
invariably loses the post or the train. When things 
were at their w r orst he tried the coward's escape 
from trouble, but even in this he failed. So he 
joined his fellows at the " Wormwood Arms," in 
Weevil Lane. It is his substitute for home. He 
and they have become what the prosperous and 
successful ignore, and have to accept failure as 
they best may, some defiantly, some querulously, 
some desperately, and some patiently. Even when, 
by chance, the lane turns at last, and some cater- 
pillar does happen to become a butterfly, the trans- 
formation of their comrade does but little good 



106 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

to them. He spreads his wings in the sunlight of 
editorial air, and forgets too often that he too was 
once even as these. And then his old friends unite 
to abuse him, and all his works and ways. For 
their creed is that to fail is to deserve to succeed : 
that to succeed in to deserve to fail. And some- 
times the creed is not wrong, sad and bitter though 
it may be. 

Go into the libraries of our great museums, 
and you will see to what a last pass the drudgery 
of hack work still brings men — aye, and women 
too. It is simply terrible to see there the haggard 
faces, the wasted frames, the hopeless aspect of 
many who cannot even reach to the consolations 
of the " Wormwood Arms." No : Grub Street is 
not swept away. It has but changed its name 
and widened its area — that is all. 



( io7 ) 



VII. 

AMONG THE MOLLUSCS. 

DURING the months which contain the letter a R" 
in their names, I cannot help regarding that inte- 
resting creature which is " neither fish, nor flesh, 
nor good red herring" — the oyster — as the true 
height of human happiness. I do not mean as an 
edible, delicious though he is, but as a type. He 
has a home, far down among the depths whence 
the wildest tempest is not strong enough to tear 
him. The waves roll and the winds roar over him, 
but he is great in his safe and self-sufficing calm. 
He has but to open his mouth or door and all 
his wants are supplied. He is an eminently 
respectable and respected mollusc — the cynic of 
the sea. He is destined to be valued even above 
his merits — at the rate of something like half-a- 



io8 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

crown a dozen. He is protected both by nature 
and by legislation : and, when his career is run, 
or rather stood out, it is to receive, by way of 
epitaph, the thanks of some grateful fellow- 
creature for benefits conferred. No wonder, with 
so sublime an example daily before our eyes, we 
do our best to emulate our fellow-native. Do we 
not turn London into a gigantic oyster bed, and 
cling to its bricks with all the force of our fibres, 
hiding as much as possible from the risks of sun- 
shine and of air ? Do we not bring comforts to 
our mouths and doors, so that we have but to open 
them to take them in ? Are we not proud of 
being the cynics of the world's sea ? Do not we 
also value ourselves even at something more than 
half-a-crown for a dozen of us ? And if we can 
in the course of our life find one grateful fellow- 
creature who will speak kind words of us after we 
are gone, do we not also feel that we have not 
lived in vain ? 

But, alas for human, if not for molluscous, per- 
versity ! One fine morning the letter " R " slips 
away from the month's name. It leaves a little 
hole through which pierces a ray of what is to be 



AMONG THE MOLLUSCS. 109 

the summer sun, fragant with the breeze that has 
swept over the flowers of the sea. It is May, the 
mother of June. The swallow has long since taken 
his passage for the sources of the Nile. We open 
our shells just a little, and our rock does not feel 
quite so soft as usual. The scent of the first 
strawberry, the first stray taste of hay that some 
imaginative people fancy they can catch even in 
the Temple, the chance sight of such words as 
Baden, Bruges, Prague, in the tables of an obsolete 
continental Bradshaw, seem suddenly to set the 
heart of the stork or swallow beating in the 
bivalve. Daily, humdrum life, though it may 
breed the pearl, seems to prove that pearl-breed- 
ing is, after all, a disease. Every well-regulated 
mind is seized with a glorious desire to be a little 
insane. The mollusc develops more swiftly than 
the laws of Darwin, and even amid the depths of 
the rocks feels the budding of inconsistent wings. 

There are paradoxical people who hold that 
London is pleasantest w T hen emptiest. The streets 
are no longer crowded. Cabs and peaches are 
cheap and plentiful. To dine en ville becomes 
almost comfortable. The drop in the ocean 



no FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

expands into an almost recognisable wave. On 
the other hand, travelling is more full of trouble 
than ever. Most things and places are more beau- 
tiful in the imagination than in their reality, while 
the history of a tour is little more than a record 
of trivial troubles and very untrivial bills. Were 
it not for the longing that makes absence of dis- 
comfort the greatest discomfort of all, how happy 
would the imprisoned oyster be ! It is something 
more than the shame of not being like her neigh- 
bours that induces even a lady to draw down her 
front blinds and live in her back rooms rather than 
confess that she has not gone out of town, or to 
make the payment of a morning call in summer 
time the offering of an insult. It is that the soul 
of the oyster has outgrown its shell. It would 
fain be for a while one of those homeless, ram- 
bling, Bohemian fishes that have no rock and breed 
no pearls, but are carried by wandering currents 
into the shark's jaws. We may bivalvise ourselves 
as hard as we please, but the instinctive love of 
novelty is too strong — we are still passage birds in 
soul. When the grass seems to peep between the 
flags of Regent-street and the clover in Pall-mall, 



AMONG THE MOLLUSCS. in 

then the billowy clouds insist not on suggesting a 
rainfall, but the Alps — the Thames, on talking of 
the sea whereto it flows. Home-sickness is bad 
enough, but nothing can compare with the sick- 
ness of the swallow that pines to flee away. 
What then must be the desire of the oyster ? It 
must transcend that of the moth for the star. 

Yes — if the lot of the mollusc be happier than 
that of the bird, then the sea anemone must be 
more blessed than the oyster, more blessed than 
the anemone the stone to which it clings. But 
though the swallow loves its nest, and can fly to it 
as straight as an arrow, over the mazes of a thou- 
sand miles, he leaves it w r hen instinct makes home 
no longer home. It is well that we, would-be 
oysters as we are, cannot rid ourselves of our 
feathered souls. It is well to be able to indulge 
in the luxury of discomfort sometimes, even if it 
is only to keep up our knowledge that comfort, 
shut up in a shell, is not a very noble thing. 



112 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 



VIII. 

AMONG THE SUNFLOWERS. 

I HAD not paid a visit to the Temple since, ten 
years ago, I was a fellow guest with the curate of 
my parish and his eldest daughter at a lunch party 
in the chambers of my friend Jack Limpet. They 
were on a visit to London in the month of May, 
and I think that the young lady enjoyed Palm- 
court better than Exeter Hall. Yesterday I had 
to plunge into its labyrinths again, alone. 

The blossom into which Clytie was turned by 
her too great love for the patron of the Muses 
must have been the earliest sundial. I do not 
remember that there was any muse of law, though 
Themis has always been on terms of cousinship, if 
not of sisterhood, with the daughters of Memory. 
But I do know that the courts of the Temple are 



AMONG THE SUNFLOWERS. 113 

remarkable for the number of those puzzling horo- 
logical instruments into which Clytie's golden dials 
afterwards developed themselves. It is true that 
on my visit yesterday I found a clock on the turret 
of the new hall : but I was to some extent con- 
soled by hearing the dinner hour proclaimed as of 
old by the primitive and unmelodious cow's horn. 
Tempora mutantur is the commonest of posies for 
the face of a sundial. The glory of the Temple is 
more than half departed with its walk by the edge 
of the Thames. The older it grows, the more it 
becomes new. It is no more the Temple of Gold- 
smith, of Charles Lamb, or even of Thackeray, 
than of the knights of the Horse or Lamb. If 
Ruth Westwood, nee Pinch, is still living, and 
were she to make a sentimental journey to the old 
fountain, she would make it in vain. Well, sic 
aqua est — another motto for a sunflower in brick 
or stone. It is something, in these days of pro- 
gress, that the Temple has not been swept away 
in steam. But, after all, if " times are changed," 
" non nos mutamur in Mis " — we have not changed 
with them. 

The Temple is the basilica of melancholy. 

8 



U4 FL OR A AND FA UNA OF L OND ON 

Burton might have made an exhaustive analysis 
of his favourite science without stirring out into 
Fleet-street. It laughs loudly, it eats and drinks 
hard, it is magnificently idle, it works desperately. 
It is not the abode of all the virtues, but the great 
virtue it has of living its life intensely. Such is 
the fascination of this intense life that men who 
have once lived in it cling to it with a kind of 
feline fondness. They attach themselves to its 
bricks as if they were barnacles on a ship's side. 
They cling, though it is the grave of as many 
hopes and good intentions as it contains paving- 
stones. Ah, here at last is No. 23, Palm-court, 
with as many names upon its door-posts as if a 
colony of rabbits had learned that three inches of 
white paint may be let for ten pounds a year. 
Here once more is Jack Limpet's name. That 
tall, broad-shouldered fellow who entertained Alice 
and her father and myself so hospitably, and was 
so profuse with his high spirits and champagne. 
He might have made his fortune in Queensland 
thrice over in these last ten years. He might 
have become the husband of Alice and of a con- 
stituency too, had he pleased. But he dropped 



AMONG THE SUNFLOWERS. 115 

into this bed of sunflowers. He had dipped into 
"the lives of the Chancellor's" and turned towards 
the woolsack as Clytis to the sun. He sits from 
ten till four in a cupboard attached to our Salle 
des pas perdus y bandying chaff that passes for wit, 
and listening to flights of forensic dulness. He is 
not paid a shilling for his trouble : but he thinks 
his presence indispensable. He reads the Law 
Reports regularly, and does nothing else all day. 
Is not law notoriously a jealous mistress, and do 
not attorneys always avoid the man who has more 
than one iron in the fire ? If only that one iron 
were a magnet ! And this life he has been leading 
ever since the lunch party ten years ago — ten 
years spent in trying to keep the wolf on the other 
side of the oak. This is the life that he calls 
following a profession. It is not a profession — it is 
a habit, and a miserable habit besides. And this, 
and worse than this, is the way in which hundreds 
and thousands of men have spent and are spending 
the best part of their lives — in which scores and 
hundreds spend the whole. Even if fortune or a 
lucid interval saves him from the w r orst bitterness 
of the end of a life-long failure — even if this hope- 



u6 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

less strife against hope by chance succeeds, it will 
be too late. Jack may possibly become Sir John ; 
but I do not think that on her tomb will Alice be 
styled " Dame." His red bag will have come to 
contain his heart, and the means of happiness will 
have become the end. " Pereunt et imputantur" 
says the dial opposite his chambers — " The hours 
perish and it is to us they are imputed." I think 
that I have at last discovered the saddest sight of 
all. It is " call night " in the Temple — in a 
garden of hopes which strain after a sunshine 
never gained until sunset, and seldom gained even 
then. 



( H7 ) 



IX. 
AMONG THE ROOKS, 

THERE are rooks and rooks, There is the rook 
that preys upon the farmer's wheat, and the rook 
that preys upon the human pigeon. The latter is 
common enough among us : he is the true Corvus 
Londinensis. But what of these half-dozen black 
rooks in their nests among still blacker London 
trees ? There is no wheat, late or early, whereon 
to fatten within many a mile of Holborn Bars. 
Unless they can feed on red tape, or on the 
crumbs of not too early breakfasts, they ought 
to starve. 

Not everybody is aware that there are real 
rooks in London still. That fact in natural history 
is known by experience only to the tenants of 
chambers on the west side of Gray's-inn-square. 



u8 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

Some zealous sportsmen have actually tried upon 
these rusty wings their skill in the use of the air 
gun, to the wonder of a savant below, who rushed 
to his desk and wrote a treatise, afterwards 
read before some learned society, " On the Fall- 
ing Sickness among Rooks and Crows." Their 
existence should also be patent to the loungers in 
Gray's Inn Gardens, only — like the snakes in 
Ireland — there are none. The rooks are a race 
of Alexander Selkirks — monarchs of all they 
survey. 

It is a weekday, and within a stone's throw of 
the busiest part of London : and it is more solitary 
than Wimpole Street on a wet Sunday. And yet 
it is not solitary. Have you quite forgotten that 
you were once a schoolboy, and knew how to 
climb a tree ? If not, then clamber up this elm, 
and see what is to be seen. You will not see a 
living form. But you will see many a living soul. 
That is Lord Chancellor Bacon, who planted the 
very tree on which you are perched, seeking in 
vain for the summer-house from which he used to 
enjoy the view of Hampstead and Highgate : you 
cannot catch a glimpse of them, even from your 



AMONG THE ROOKS. 119 

tree. Lord Burleigh meets him : he, too, lodged 
in the Inn — and shakes his head more pro- 
foundly over what we call our " statesmanship " 
than he did when he heard the first tidings of the 
Spanish invasion. Things are altered, he thinks, 
since the-days of Good Queen Bess, whose "glorious 
and immortal memory " is still solemnly drunk by 
barristers and students in Spanish wine over the 
tables of Spanish oak — relics of the wreck of the 
Armada— that she gave to the hall. But what 
strange figures are these ? As we rooks live, 'tis 
Puck and Peas Blossom, Oberon and Titania, 
Theseus and Hippolyta, Helena and Hermia, and 
Bottom the Weaver. At their head is he of the 
high, bald forehead and pointed beard — their poet 
and ours. They sweep over the rank sward, leav- 
ing fairy rings — past the chapel, on to the hall. 
Yes, you may forget the statecraft of Burleigh, 
the wisdom of Bacon, but you cannot forget that 
this inn of court, where the rooks still caw like 
lawyers at Nisi Prius, beheld the first performance 
of the Midsummer Night's Dream. We are among 
deed-boxes, dust, and debt, but we are in Fairy- 
land, 



120 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

Once a romance had its rise in those ground- 
floor chambers now occupied by some artist, 
journalist, or attorney — by any one but a barrister, 
for the bar fights shy of this corner of legal 
Bohemia. One fine summer's evening a party of 
students sat at the window over their wine. A 
pretty nursemaid, airing her charge in the garden 
— more frequented then — was not averse to a little 
conversation. By and by she was prevailed upon, 
by way of jest, to hand the infant into the room. 
She was seen to pass round the corner on her way 
to reclaim it at the door, but was never seen again. 
The young men found themselves in the joint 
possession of a fine little girl of some nine months 
old. Making her a sort of " Figlia del Reggi- 
mento," they bound themselves to be thenceforth 
the protectors and godfathers of her whom they 
christened Emma Gray. Is not that an idea for 
the beginning of a novel ? She might be a duke's 
daughter, and in the last chapter marry the hand- 
somest of her godfathers. What an opening for a 
plot there would be — one young girl forming a 
link to bind together a dozen men with hostile 
interests and conflicting characters. It is the fitter 



AMONG THE ROOKS. 121 

subject for romance, for of her after life history 
tells us nothing. Only one may be sure that the 
cawing of rooks sounded all her life long like a 
melody running through the discordant London 
roar. That unmusical music is full of vague, 
suggestive, dreamy harmonies when it sounds 
among green fields and sunny hills. How much 
more suggestive is it of contrasts and of memories 
when it grates upon the ear in that oasis of silence 
in a desert of sound which we call Gray's Inn. 



122 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 



X. 

AMONG THE CAGES. 

The whole natural history of London may be read 
in its ornithology. To begin with, every grade of 
society is represented by its feathered population, 
caged or uncaged, from the sparrow that gains its 
living from the streets, in the face of the watchful 
constabulary of the tiles, to the almost royal 
parrot, who has a whole household at command, 
and is treated as though he were a prince 
bewitched by an evil genii, or like some popular 
statesman whose random words, though repeated 
for the thousandth time, are gathered up as 
though they were pearls. Every race is typified 
by our fellow biped, from our own native finches 
who, in captivity, become the bourgeoisie of British 
birds, to the gorgeous strangers who cross the sea 



AMONG THE CAGES. 123 

from Malacca or Peru. Again, they have their 
proper quarters of the town. Just as one goes to 
Whitechapel to look for a German, to Soho for a 
Frenchman, and to Hatton Garden for an Italian, 
so do the thrushes congregate in St. Giles's, the 
rooks by Holborn, and the canaries in Spitalfields* 
Of individual character there is no need to speak. 
They are as various as among women — who are 
not so very various, after all. Probably thief does 
not differ from thief much more than sparrow from 
sparrow, or more than lawyer from lawyer, crow 
from crow. All are leaves of the world's tree, 
which differ in microscopic detail, but grow and 
live and wither in the same seasons and by the 
same law. 

People may say what they will about the 
weight of bricks and paving-stones that imprisons 
the human heart of London, which must be 
beating somewhere, even though it be so hard to 
read, so hard even to find. Why, those who have 
ears to hear through the rattle and whirl of the 
streets cannot listen for a single instant without 
catching the music of its pulsations. Buried deep 
it may be, but its very depth renders it only the 



124 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

more deeply vocal. The soprano song of the 
woods, when caged, only turns to the contralto 
voice which contains the true pathos of song — the 
voice which comes from the imprisoned heart, not 
only from the throat which sings just because it 
was made to sing. It is but that we ourselves 
have no time, perhaps no power, to sing. We 
have to free our hearts by deputy, as the Japanese 
are said to pray. Only we may be sure that the 
song is in our case none the less sweet and 
musical for being caged, or for our deputies being 
the innocent singers that they are. It is fitting 
that angels should be represented with feathered 
wings. 

I have said that canaries are a feature of 
Spitalfields. It must surely be by force of 
contrast if it is by force of any reason at all. 
Indeed, the love for this special kind of birds 
amounts to a passion, for which some people 
strive to account by tracing a subtle connection 
between the descendants of the exiles of the 
Azores and the descendants of the exiles of 
Auvergne, who muster in that quarter strongly 
still. There may be something in such sympathy : 



AMONG THE CAGES. 125 

but, be this as it may, yonder old fellow who is 
slouching round the corner has not a drop of 
French blood, however remote, in his veins. He 
is neither a weaver nor the great grandson of a 
weaver. He is prematurely broken down by 
misery and gin. He spends half his days in 
public-houses, the other half in prison-cells. He 
never knew a letter of the alphabet, but he has 
been a good workman in his time, though never a 
sober one. But in those days, though he never 
had a wife or child, or knew father or mother, he 
had a home ; and solely to keep that home 
together he toiled hard during his sober hours and 
kept himself from crime. He literally lived for a 
fellow-creature, and that fellow-creature was a bird. 
He had to keep a roof over its head, and to save 
sufficient halfpence from the barman's till to keep 
it in health and luxury. Does that seem in- 
credible ? To him it seemed the most natural 
thing in the world — and not only natural to him, 
but to many of his neighbours too, who were by 
no means a colony of fine ladies 01 tender-hearted 
girls. He had bought the bird for a bargain from 
a canary-fancier, who was a broken-down pugilist : 



126 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

but the golden notes of its song somehow pre- 
vented his trying to sell it again. It seemed to 
penetrate among the unconscious possibilities of 
what might have been. He even fought battles in 
its honour in the spirit, if not according to the 
forms, of ancient chivalry. It was thus that he 
fell at last into the clutches from which he had so 
long tried to keep himself free. A street fight led 
to a week or two in gaol : and when he came out 
again the bird had long been starved. His one 
song was silent ; and he himself became the caged 
gaol-bird that you see. 

Such are London birds, that learn in captivity 
to sing for us our hidden songs, and to build their 
nests in hearts instead of leaves. 



( 127 ) 



XL 

AMONG THE WATER-LILIES. 

A STUDENT of London's natural history who, in 
order that his work may be complete, feels himself 
bound to devote a chapter to its water-lilies, is in 
the position of the celebrated naturalist who wrote 
that celebrated chapter upon the snakes of Ireland. 
Thanks to St. Patrick, the chapter was unique for 
brevity. It is needless to add that, by one gazing 
from any of the river bridges, no water or any 
other lilies are to be seen, unless there be a Citizen 
or Iron boat bearing that name. But there was 
once, in days before London was dreamed of, a 
certain goddess, well known at Memphis and 
Alexandria. Her name was Isis. She wore a 
garland of lotus-flowers, which are nothing less or 
more than the water-lilies of the Nile, which was 
nothing more or less than Cleopatra's Thames. 



128 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

She was veiled from head to foot, and that veil 
never was lifted by any profane hand. Whether 
she was a barbaric Venus, or whether she was like 
the skeleton at her country's feasts, no one but her 
priests could say. London is the Isis among cities ; 
and for that reason, whether the Thames bear 
water-lilies or no, we are among the water-lilies, 
whatever they may be, that form her garland. 
She, like her mythological prototype, is veiled : 
nor are there many eyes able to pierce below her 
rags and her fine clothes. But once in the twenty- 
four^ hours she throws off her disguise: and the 
hour she chooses for her self-revelation is when she 
thinks there are no eyes to see. Indeed, it is more 
true to say, not that she throws off her veil, but 
that her veil falls from her when she is sleeping 
among the lotus flowers of dreams — the only kind 
of lotus-eating our days, wherein it is never after- 
noon, permit us to know. 

I have spoken of one hour in the twenty-four. 
Rather should I have spoken of one half-hour in 
the eight-and-forty. It is for not more than thirty 
short and sudden minutes that London is freed 
from rags and robes. It is not more than thirty 



AMONG THE WATER-LILIES. 129 

minutes that stand between the last man who goes 
to bed at night and the first who rises in the 
morning, between the latest bird and the earliest 
worm. Few people know there is such a time at 
all. The theatres are over long ago. The earliest 
market waggons have not yet passed out of sight 
of the gardens that form the fringe of the veil. 
Even the ball at which you have been playing at 
enjoying yourself has received its apotheosis in the 
last after-supper galop. Say that it has been in 
the south-western region, built upon marshes in 
whose midst the abbey was once a solitary island 
as well as a sanctuary, w 7 here houses stand for 
long-forgotten water-lilies. You are the worse for 
want of oxygen — for nothing more. For once let 
us be superior to the temptation of waking from 
his sleep on the box the driver of what Mr. Disraeli 
was once pleased to call a gondola. The term is 
more appropriate than ever. The canals of Venice, 
the dead city, are not so silent, so solitary, so dead, 
as these London streets, fresh from the builder's 
hand. You, in dress-clothes, have suddenly left 
behind an atmosphere in which you vainly thought 
yourself admirably clothed and in your sane mind, 

9 



130 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

to pass the threshold of a world in which you 
feel like Oberon in a drawing-room. The tables 
are turned. 

The outlines of stucco are as clear and sharp 
in the grey light as if new chiselled in marble by 
the hands of fairy tomb-sculptors. No kitchen 
fires as yet are lighted to blear them into strokes 
traced on damp blotting paper. You feel, for once, 
what it is to be alone in an unknown and unrecog- 
nised world. You are a stranger in the streets 
which are as familiar to you by day as your own 
staircase, or the country lanes in which you used 
to ramble once upon a time. There is something 
in the atmosphere that is altogether new and 
strange. If it is your fate to pass through 
St. James's Park, you can hardly find your way. 
The pond blossoms with imaginary water-lilies : 
even Buckingham Palace looks imposing. In the 
flesh you are at home, in the spirit you are a 
stranger. In the streets you notice names, numbers, 
combinations of doors and windows, that you never 
noticed before. All things have suffered a change 
in the uniform grey air. The pavement, trodden 
by so many heels, devotes itself to multiply your 



AMONG THE WATER-LILIES. 131 

own footsteps a hundred times, until you feel pain- 
fully as though there were nothing in all London 
but you, and as though yourself w r ere changed into 
sound. Even the two policemen, always to be 
found conversing at stray corners where no tres- 
passer but a cat ever comes, and whose tramp, as 
they part, sounds like a muffled repetition of your 
own rapid tread, take upon themselves an appear- 
ance of phantoms. You would laugh at the thought 
were laughter possible in an air in which you fear 
to wake even the echoes. If you are of a nervous 
temper, no dream that the early lateness of the 
hour will permit you to steal from morning will 
feel so like a dream. You are fatigued in body. 
and morbidly unfatigued in mind. You are awake 
and asleep. Yours are the only waking eyes, the 
only moving limbs, in a world of life. Your brain 
becomes morbidly conscious of the slightest sight, 
of the slightest sound : while nothing is to be seen 
but a vista of straight lines — nothing to be heard 
but your own footfall. London has grown mysti- 
cally beautiful — her veil has fallen. But — what is 
that primrose tint, creeping up through, not along, 
the sky ? You have a hundred times witnessed the 



132 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 

saffron glow of a fire. But this — it is sunrise ! 
Yes, the sun rises, even in London. Hurry home- 
ward, for the charm is about to fade. That is a 
spiral of smoke curling into the air, to blot out the 
first beam of the dawn. Isis is waking. She is 
donning her weeds, that stand to her for lotus- 
flowers. 

There is nowhere but in the one half-hour of 
London's sleep that a man can feel himself to be 
alone. Between the hedges he hears the song of 
birds, even though it be reduced to the hoot of the 
owl. Nature never sleeps — not even among her 
alps and seas. London sleeps for one short half- 
hour, but in that short half-hour she turns all 
things into a dream. Life is her veil. When life 
sleeps she wakes, and becomes, not the metropolis 
of the world, but of the land in which Oberon is 
king — king even over those who dance by night 
and hide themselves from her in the counting- 
house by day. For thirty minutes London lives 
without life, and teaches those who know her not 
how little she is known. 



( 133 ) 



XII, 

AMONG THE SPARROWS. 

Why has no 'painter, without funds to carry him 
far afield in search of novelty, made a reputation 
by turning into a picture a subject that he may 
find without going more than a mile or two — 
perhaps not a hundred yards — from home ? The 
broad walk of St. James's Park, as we late risers 
know it, is not picturesque. In its recognized 
hours it is a parade ground for cabs, perambulators, 
guardsmen, and cockneys. It has its uses : but 
the useful is not of necessity the beautiful. But 
there is one hour of the four-and-twenty of a 
spring day when it is absolutely beautiful. And 
that hour is when the sun first rises, and the 

9-3 



134 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

sparrows hold clamorous parliament before they 
set out upon the chase of the early worm. 

Before the kitchen fires are lighted, not even 
the boasted atmosphere of Paris or Florence is 
clearer, brighter, or fresher than ours. So pure 
are then the outlines of our dullest streets, that 
our palaces look almost imposing, and our monu- 
ments almost like the works of art that they 
pretend to be. The new-leaved trees, glittering 
with sunlit dew, show no symptoms of town save 
in their blackened stems. Through them, its grey 
walls tinged with rose, break glimpses of the 
abbey. Even the barbarous clock-tower adds to 
the effect when its gilding reflects the morning's 
gold. It is a scene in which the very sparrows, 
cockneys as they are, seem to sing a country 
song. 

But it is this terrible London of ours, after all. 
The sparrows' chatter dispels a charm. They are 
the destroyers of dreams. You, who are drinking 
in the freshness of morning, are either outwatching 
the night or anticipating the day. But in either 
case you are the owner of a bed from which you 
have just risen, or in which you are about to lie 



AMONG THE SPARROWS. 135 

down. Not so those who come back from dream- 
land into life at the summons of these birds. As 
you pass, the benches wake up slowly, and yield 
again to the streets what they had gathered from 
the streets the night before. Who are all these — 
whence do they come, and whither do they go ? 
There is no sadder sight than to see how the 
beauty of nature may for an hour triumph over 
an atmosphere of bricks and mortar, but cannot, 
even for an hour, hold its own against the misery 
for which there are no bricks and mortar to build 
a home. That is no common pauper who is just 
stretching out his ill-rested limbs. Do you re- 
member Rockett of St. Margaret's — the most 
brilliant scholar and best dressed man of his year ? 
Some labelled him bishop : some prime minister. 
Well — that starved, blotched, ragged fellow is he. 
Is it drink that has brought him to this ? Is it 
dice ? Is it overwhelming fate ? Pass by on the 
other side, unless you are so greedy of gratitude as 
to w T ish to be abjectly thanked for the price of a 
roll at the nearest coffee-stall. On the same bench 
still sleeps, despite the sparrows, a man who was 
once a millionaire, a director of railways and 



136 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 

mines, But he has gone under the waves of life — 
to-morrow, look for him under the waters of the 
Thames. On the next is one who came to town 
six weeks ago to turn his brains and 20/. into 
gold. He was poet, painter, musician, actor — 
what matters what he was in his own conceit when 
he has spent his last penny, and is neither energetic 
enough nor rogue enough to turn another ? He 
wakes from dreams of fame to find himself between 
a forger flying from the police, and a drunken 
cripple. None of these, except the last, but is 
prouder than the refuse of the casual ward. But 
not far off is one who is in a worse plight still : 
for it is a woman. May she not wake too soon to 
her daily life, unless the dreams of home with 
which the sparrows' twitter fills her sleeping ears 
are too terrible to bear. 

No : it is no wonder, after all, that no painter 
has made this his out-door studio. He would be 
more of a cynic than it is in the nature of a true 
artist to be, were he able to fix his mind upon the 
glittering leaves, the fresh air, and the distant 
abbey that is our historic sanctuary. He could 
not have the heart to paint for wealth or fame in 



AMONG THE SPARROWS. 137 

an atmosphere of failure, disappointment, and 
despair. Perhaps not one of those around him 
may chance to be the hero or heroine of a true 
tragedy : but there is none, drunk or sober, who 
is in sympathy with the breeze of daybreak, or 
the merry chatter of the birds. 



THE END. 



LONDON I 

PRINTED BY SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 

OLD BAILEY, E.C. 



BY 7 HE SAME AUTHOR. 



Just Published, in One Volume, Crown 8vo., with Four 
Illustrations. 

PEARL AND EMERALD : 

A TALE OF GOTHAM. 
By R. E. FRANCILLON. 



LONDON: 
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 



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